100 Million Words of English: The British National Corpus (BNC)

Abstract

This paper is a brief decription of the British National Corpus (BNC) project, which is a collaboration between commercial and academic partners. The "100 million words of English" corpus is intended to be representative of a whole range of English language currently used in speech and writing. The main tasks of corpus development can be listed as: corpus design, acquisition and preparation of data, corpus processing and making corpus material available to end-users. The focuses on four main areas of application, i.e. linguistic research, reference publishing, natural language processing by computer and language teaching.