The Freiburg–LOB Corpus of British English (F-LOB)
The Freiburg update of the LOB corpus (F-LOB) is part of the ‘Brown family’ of corpora. Work on the compilation of F-LOB and its counterpart, the Freiburg-Brown corpus of American English (Frown), began in 1991. Both corpora were intended to match the Brown and LOB corpora as closely as possible in size and composition, with the only difference that they should represent the language of the early 1990s.
Like the original Brown and LOB corpora, F-LOB contains 500 texts of around 2000 words each, distributed across 15 text categories.
The texts were not obtained by random sampling but were selected carefully to match the LOB corpus as closely as possible. The main aim was to achieve a close comparability with LOB rather than some kind of general statistical representativeness of printing output in Britain, in order to provide linguists with an empirical basis to study language change in progress. There are two versions of the F-LOB corpus, the original version and a POS-tagged version – produced jointly with Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster) and Nick Smith (then Lancaster, now Leicester).
Project leader: Christian Mair, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Time of compilation: 1991–1996
Size: approx. 1 million words
Language: English
Number of texts/samples: 500
Period: 1991
Released: 1999 (original version), 2007 (POS-tagged version)
Funding (plain-text version): Original (plain-text) version: DFG (German Research Foundation) Sonderforschungsbereich (special research group) 321 ‘Orality and Literacy’ from 1994 to 1996
Funding (POS-tagged version): Research at Lancaster by Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith was supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust. Freiburg's work on manual post-editing was assisted by a grant from the DFG.
Reference lines and copyright
The Freiburg-LOB Corpus (‘F-LOB’) (original version) compiled by Christian Mair, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
The Freiburg-LOB Corpus (‘F-LOB’) (POS-tagged version) compiled by Christian Mair, Albert Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, and Geoffrey Leech, University of Lancaster
Manual
Original (plain-text) Version: Hundt, Marianne, Andrea Sand, and Rainer Siemund. 1999. Manual of Information to accompany The Freiburg – LOB Corpus of British English (‘FLOB’). Freiburg: Department of English. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. http://khnt.aksis.uib.no/icame/manuals/flob/INDEX.HTM.
POS-Tagged Version: Hinrichs, Lars, Nicholas Smith, and Birgit Waibel. 2007. The part-of-speech-tagged ‘Brown’ corpora: A manual of information, including pointers for successful use. Freiburg: Department of English. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.
Compilers
Christian Mair (project leader)
The following people were involved in the process of selecting and typing the text-extracts and/or proofreading: Birgit Felleisen, Heike Fiedler, Elke Frings, Elke Gebhard, Dorothee Graf, Ulrike Günther, Marianne Hundt, Matthias Kaufmann, Manfred Krug, Christoph Lindner, Isolde Mattmüller-Ofori, Nadja Nesselhauf, Christine Oesterlee, Andrea Sand, Paul Skandera, and Heike Schnitzler. Heike Fiedler helped in the proofreading and editing of the manual
Christoph Lindner wrote the programme used to assign the category references and line-numbers to the ASCII-texts, and Heike Peper-Ludwig helped in computer-related emergencies.
The following people worked at different stages on the compilation and post-editing of POS-tagged F-LOB and Frown: Franziska Becker, Lucas Champollion, Septimius Fericean, Heike Fiedler, Ulf Gerdelmann, Lars Hinrichs, Marianne Hundt, Matthias Kaufmann, Tobias Maier, Christian Mair, Michael Percillier, Stefanie Rapp, Andrea Sand, Silke Scheible, Birgit Waibel, Antonia Walker and Lisa-Maria Wild.
Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith at Lancaster University worked on the automatic tagging of the Brown corpora and Mike Pacey contributed greatly to developing the Template Tagger software.
Availability
Available for research; distribution and licence through ICAME.
Associated projects
The Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English (LOB)
The Brown Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English
The Freiburg update of the Brown corpus (Frown)
The Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English (Shastri 1988)
The Australian Corpus of English (Collins & Peters 1988)
The Wellington Corpus of New Zealand English (Bauer 1993)
CoRD Entry submitted on March 26, 2009 by Susanne Jantos.
Information for the entry was edited by Prof. Dr. Christian Mair & Susanne Jantos.
The index page was revised on June 19, 2012 by Prof. Dr. Christian Mair.
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