LOB background and history

The initiative to compile a British English counterpart to the Brown Corpus was taken by Geoffrey Leech, Lancaster University. Most of the texts were selected and converted to machine-readable form at Lancaster University. Those involved in the compilation of the corpus at Lancaster included Rosemary Leonard and Helen Goodluck. The corpus was completed in Norway under the direction of Stig Johansson (project leader) and Knut Hofland (head of computing): correspondence with copyright holders, replacement of some texts, proof-reading and correction of all the texts, completion of the manual.

The initiative to compile a POS-tagged version was taken jointly by Geoffrey Leech and Stig Johansson. The starting-point was the recently completed POS-tagged version of the Brown Corpus. A statistical approach to POS-tagging was developed at Lancaster University by Ian Marshall under the direction of Geoffrey Leech and Roger Garside. The program has later been developed and is known as CLAWS; the latest version is the fourth release, known as CLAWS4. The Norwegian contribution included: the development of word lists and suffix lists for the tagging suite, consistency checking and post-editing of the tagged texts, completion of the manual for the tagged corpus. The computational development in Norway was handled by Knut Hofland.

Some other key people taking part in the LOB Corpus tagging project were: Eric Atwell and Ian Marshall (Lancaster University), Mette-Cathrine Jahr (University of Oslo).

See further the prefaces to the two manuals. Note also in particular:

Garside, Roger, Geoffrey Leech & Geoffrey Sampson, eds. 1987. The Computational Analysis of English. A Corpus-based Approach. London: Longman.

Johansson, Stig. 2008. "Some aspects of the development of corpus linguistics in the 1970s and 1980s". In: Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.), Corpus Linguistics. An International Handbook, 33-53. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Leech, Geoffrey & Rosemary Leonard. 1974. "A computer corpus of British English." Hamburger Phonetische Beiträge 13: 41-57.