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Research on natural language processing leading to improved language tests and dictionaries for millions of language learners

Summary of the impact

Worldwide impact on language learners and others has been generated by the development at Lancaster of a ground-breaking natural language processing tool (CLAWS4), and an associated unique collection of natural language data (the British National Corpus, or BNC). Some highlights selected from the primary impacts are as follows:

  • Cambridge University Press has significantly improved the quality of its language learning materials (over 60 books) via key enhancements to its core source material that have been enabled by CLAWS4 and the BNC;
  • The Society for Testing English Proficiency (STEP) in Japan has based a widely-used Language Test (EIKEN) on data analysed by CLAWS4. The EIKEN test is taken by two million schoolchildren every year.

The pathways to impact have been primarily via consultancy and via licencing of software IP. The impact itself is largely on the language learners—i.e. users of products such as the above. There is a secondary economic impact on a UK SME which has licenced our software.

Submitting Institution

Lancaster University

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Public dissemination of the British National Corpus

Summary of the impact

The 100-million-word British National Corpus of UK English texts and speech is used regularly and extensively as a reference resource on the contemporary English language. Its users include dictionary makers, school teachers in many countries, teachers of English as a second language, the OCR school examinations board, and many individual writers on the internet as a reference source about questions of contemporary English usage. Its use has led to improved English dictionaries that more accurately reflect actual usage: for Longman, Chambers and OUP dictionaries, use of the BNC provides a unique selling point over their competitors and enhanced educational value to readers. For students and English language teachers world-wide, the BNC provides more realistic examples of the usage of words and phrases in context, and in different registers, free of charge via various online search portals, and thus improved education in English.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Economic

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Creating educational and commercial access to English language resources: using corpora for English language teaching and learning

Summary of the impact

We used the research consolidated in the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) to build the Internet Grammar of English (IGE), a web-based introductory English grammar; and an app for smartphones and tablets, called the interactive Grammar of English (iGE). The app is based on the IGE website, but was fully updated with new materials and exercises. Both resources have had educational and commercial impact as tools for English language teaching, reaching over 1.2 million users in 2008-2013 through the website and over 34,500 through the app.

Submitting Institution

University College London

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Language Unlocked

Summary of the impact

University of Huddersfield research into corpus stylistics has led to the development of Language Unlocked, a consultancy service that uses linguistic methodologies and interpretative procedures to help public, private, third-sector and non-governmental organisations. Language Unlocked has informed clients' strategic decision-making, communicated their organisational strategies and assisted them in realising long-term goals. Beneficiaries have included Britain's unions, which have reassessed their communications policies; the Green Party, which has revised its policies, manifestos and communications; and a major chemical company, which increased its visibility as a result of carefully worded advertising.

Submitting Institution

University of Huddersfield

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Widening understanding of the earliest written literature through The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Summary of the impact

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) is quoted and used in both schools and colleges across the world and read by people without any direct academic connection to the subject: widening access to, interest in, and understanding of Sumerian literature. Sumerian literature is widely known as one of the oldest literatures in the world, inspiring countless studies of world literature and history of religion. The ETCSL has made the bulk of canonical Sumerian literature (c. 400 compositions) available in prose translations and the original Sumerian to both specialists and informal learners for more than a decade.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Classics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Cultural Studies, Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

The Talk of the Toon: Enhancing the Linguistic Cultural Heritage of North East England

Summary of the impact

Talk of the Toon is an online resource that preserves the cultural heritage of North Eastern English dialects giving users unprecedented access to multimedia material spanning five decades. Researchers collaborated with regional museums in this initiative during the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) project (2010-2012), thereby providing them with new avenues for the public to benefit from their collections. The pedagogical resources generated have also significantly benefitted primary and secondary education. Building on regional engagement initiatives through targeted national/international workshops, the impact has also reached beyond the HEI and region to a wider range of educators and students worldwide.

Submitting Institution

Newcastle University

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics
History and Archaeology: Curatorial and Related Studies

Academic, educational and commercial benefits of effective textual search and annotation

Summary of the impact

Based in the School of English, the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) conducts research in the field of corpus linguistics and develops innovative software tools to allow a wide range of external audiences to locate, annotate and use electronic data more effectively. This case study details work carried out by the RDUES team (Matt Gee, Andrew Kehoe, Antoinette Renouf) in building large-scale corpora of web texts, from which examples of language use have been extracted, analysed, and presented in a form suitable for teaching and research across and beyond HE, including collaboration with commercial partners.

Submitting Institution

Birmingham City University

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Public and educational use of language research: the online Scottish Corpora

Summary of the impact

Researchers at the University of Glasgow have created the first freely accessible online database of written and spoken texts in Scottish English and Scots. Together, the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech (SCOTS) and the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW), both developed at Glasgow, provide over 10 million words of text from a range of sources, complemented by audio and video recordings and digitised manuscripts and documents. They have succeeded in raising interest in and awareness of Scottish English and Scots among the general public: 40% of SCOTS's resources were contributed by the public, and the website achieved 165,000 page views per month at launch. The database is also widely used by commercial lexicographers and professionals in secondary education. It is an `essential data source' for Scottish Language Dictionaries, `in day-to-day use' by the Oxford English Dictionary, and from 2006-2013 has been deployed by school examination boards across the UK (Highers, A-Levels, Cambridge International, and Oxford, Cambridge and RSA exams).

Submitting Institution

University of Glasgow

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Language Studies, Linguistics

Using Computational Lexicography for Dictionary Production with the Sketch Engine

Summary of the impact

The University of Brighton (UoB) has developed a new corpus-evidence-based approach to lexicography along with supporting tools and training resources. This approach has resulted in the development of a computational lexicography tool, the Sketch Engine, commercialised by Lexical Computing Ltd. The Sketch Engine has been adopted by four of the UK's five major dictionary publishers, national language institutes in nine European countries and over 100 universities, to support commercial dictionary production, language technology products and to enable language teaching. It has also been used to substantiate arguments in a pervasive debate about language use in the art world.

Submitting Institution

University of Brighton

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Technological

Research Subject Area(s)

Education: Specialist Studies In Education
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru / A Dictionary of the Welsh Language

Summary of the impact

Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (GPC) is a historical dictionary similar to the Oxford English Dictionary, and is the acknowledged authority on the spelling, derivation and meaning of Welsh words. Apart from its scholarly uses, it is used in all areas of the Welsh public sphere, providing the lexical information necessary to produce terminology for bilingual documentation in fields such as government, education, health, law and business. GPC has always had a network of voluntary readers and informants, and uses both old and new media to seek examples of contemporary usage and to promote public interest in the language. A concise version of the dictionary has been freely available online since 2003, and a full version will be launched in 2014.

Submitting Institutions

University of Wales,University of Wales, Trinity Saint David

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics, Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

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