International Corpus of English

The International Corpus of English (ICE) is a set of corpora representing varieties of English from around the world. Over twenty countries or groups of countries where English is the first language or an official second language are included.Phonecalls (10)Broadcast Discussions (20)Broadcast Interviews (10)Parliamentary Debates (10)Legal cross-examinations (10)Business Transactions (10)Unscripted Speeches (30)Broadcast Talks (20)Non-broadcast Talks (10)Exam Scripts (10)Business Letters (15)Social Sciences (10)Social Sciences (10)Skills/hobbies (10) The International Corpus of English (ICE) is a set of corpora representing varieties of English from around the world. Over twenty countries or groups of countries where English is the first language or an official second language are included. Sidney Greenbaum's goal to compile corpora that would compare the syntax of world English became the ICE project that was achieved by Professor Charles F. Meyer. Sidney Greenbaum anticipated for international teams of researchers to collect comparable national variations of English both written and spoken. Comparable variations would be British English, American English, and Indian English, that would be represented through a computer corpora. The corpora are used by researchers to compare the syntax of the varieties of English. ICE corpora completion would have comprehensive linguistic analysis of varieties of English that have emerged. Ongoing research for ICE is implemented by international teams in diversified regions. The project began in 1990 with the primary aim of collecting material for comparative studies of English worldwide. Twenty-three research teams around the world are preparing electronic corpora of their own national or regional variety of English. Each ICE corpus consists of one million words of spoken and written English produced after 1989. For most participating countries, the ICE project is stimulating the first systematic investigation of the national variety. To ensure compatibility among the component corpora, each team is following a common corpus design, as well as a common scheme for grammatical annotation. Each corpus contains one million words in 500 texts of 2000 words, following the sampling methodology used for the Brown Corpus. Unlike Brown or the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (LOB) Corpus (or indeed mega-corpora such as the British National Corpus), however, the majority of texts are derived from spoken data. With only one million words per corpus, ICE corpora are considered very small for modern standards. ICE corpora contain 60% (600,000 words) of orthographically transcribed spoken English. The father of the project, Sidney Greenbaum, insisted on the primacy of the spoken word, following Randolph Quirk and Jan Svartvik's collaboration on the original London-Lund Corpus (LLC). This emphasis on word-for-word transcription marks out ICE from many other corpora, including those containing, e.g. parliamentary or legal paraphrases. The corpora consist entirely of data from 1990 or later. The subjects from which the data was collected are all adults who were educated in English and were either born, or moved at an early age, to the country to which their data is attributed. There are speech and text samples from both men and women of many age groups, but the corpus website makes it a point to note that, 'The proportions, however, are not representative of the proportions in the population as a whole: women are not equally represented in professions such as politics and law, and so do not produce equal amounts of discourse in these fields.' The British Component of ICE, ICE-GB, is fully parsed with a detailed Quirk et al. phrase structure grammar, and the analyses have been thoroughly checked and completed. This analysis includes a part-of-speech tagging and parsing of the entire corpus. The treebank can be thoroughly searched and explored with the ICE Corpus Utility Program or ICECUP software. More information is in the handbook. To ensure compatibility between the individual corpora in ICE, each team is following a common corpus design, as well as a common scheme for grammatical annotation. Many corpora are currently available for download on the ICE official webpage, though some require a license. Others, however, are not ready for publication. Researchers and Linguists follow specific guidelines when annotating data for the corpus, which can be found here, in the International Corpus of English Manuals and Documentation. The three levels of annotation are Text Markup, Wordclass Tagging, Syntactic Parsing. Original markup and layout such as sentence and paragraph parsing is preserved, with special markers indicating it as original. Spoken data is transcribed orthographically, with indicators for hesitations, false starts, and pauses.