+++ Apologies for cross-postings +++
*Call for Papers*
ICE Corpora in the Age of AI. Pre-conference workshop @ ICAME 47
The International Copus of English (ICE) project, founded in 1990 (Greenbaum 1996, Greenbaum & Nelson 1996), has been a tremendous success: 15 ICE corpora of Englishes around the world have been completed to date and numerous articles on the use and structures of varieties of English have been published on findings generated by these corpora. What role do the ICE corpora play today, 35 years after their conception? On the one hand, 35 years after their conception, ICE corpora are increasingly being criticised as being too small, using an outdated data format and being difficult to handle for automatic analyses. Moreover, those ICE corpora collected 20 years ago may be considered outdated or at least not representing the contemporary use of the respective variety of English anymore (e.g. Botha & Bernaisch 2025). More generally, the original design, to some extent modeled on contexts of use applying to Great Britain, turned out not to match the reality of all varieties of English. On the other hand, ICE corpora have been shown to still constitute excellent sources for research on varieties of English even in comparison with big data (Loureiro-Porto 2017). In particular, coverage of a range of spoken and written registers sets the ICE corpora apart from more recent corpora. By the same token, some ICE corpora have been updated and extended to include modern data formats as well as new annotations (e.g., Conrad et al. 2025, Gut & Fuchs 2017, Schützler et al. 2017, Kallen & Kirk 2012, Wong et al. 2011, Wunder et al. 2010).
This workshop addresses the question of what role ICE corpora can play in the age of AI: Do they still constitute a good source for research, especially compared to the mega corpora of online data? How can they be updated for easier processing? How can new ICE cropora be collected using AI methods such as Whisper for the automatic transcription of spoken data? Should they be increased in size? Should new text categories be added and/or the original corpus design be revised? How can we be sure not to include texts generated by AI?
The workshop is intended to bring together people involved in the (i) compilation, (ii) computational handling and (iii) use of the International Corpus of English.
We invite submissions of abstracts addressing perspectives in compiling, computationally handling and using the International Corpus of English in the age of AI. Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words (excluding references), using the ICAME format https://wp.uni-koblenz.de/icame47/cfp/, and should be sent to the workshop organisers by December 10 2025.
Organisers
Ulrike Gut, Universität Münster
Stella Neumann, RWTH Aachen University
Gerold Schneider, Universität Zürich
Conference website
https://wp.uni-koblenz.de/icame47/
References
Botha, W., & Bernaisch, T. (2025). World Englishes and sociolinguistic variation. World Englishes, 44, 2–11. DOI: 10.1111/weng.12695
Conrad, S., Neumann, S., Frenken, F., & Schneider, G. (2025). Updating the international corpus of English for the 21st century: Towards a standardized XML-compliant markup. Corpus Linguistics 2025 Book of Abstracts, 74.
Gut, U., & Fuchs, R. (2017). Exploring speaker fluency with phonologically annotated ICE corpora. World Englishes, 36, 387–403.
Greenbaum, S. (1996). Comparing English Worldwide. Oxford University Press.
Greenbaum, S., & Nelson, G. (1996). The International Corpus of English (ICE) project. World Englishes, 15, 3–15.
Kallen, J. & Kirk, J. (2012). SPICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. https://johnmkirk.etinu.net/johnmkirk/documents/003648.pdf
Loureiro-Porto, L. (2017). ICE vs GloWbE: Big data and corpus compilation. World Englishes, 36, 448–70. DOI: 10.1111/weng.12281
Schützler, O., Gut, U., & Fuchs, R. (2017). New perspectives on Scottish Standard English. Introducing the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. In S. Hancil & J. Beal (Eds.), Perspectives on Northern Englishes (pp. 273–301). De Gruyter Mouton.
Wong, D., Cassidy, S., & Peters, P. (2011). Updating the ICE annotation system: Tagging, parsing and validation. Corpora, 6(2), 115–144. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2011.0009
Wunder, E.-M., Voormann, H., & Gut, U. (2010). The ICE Nigeria corpus project: Creating an open, rich and accurate corpus. ICAME Journal, 34, 78–88.
Prof. Dr. Stella Neumann
Anglistische Sprachwissenschaft
RWTH Aachen University
Institut für Anglistik
Zi. 101
Kármánstr. 17/19
D-52062 Aachen
Tel. +49 (0)241 80-96105