The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES), based in the School of English at Birmingham City University, is a small team of corpus linguists, software engineers and statisticians. We carry out fundamental and applied research in corpus linguistics, developing new descriptions of the language in use and tools for the extraction and management of knowledge in databases. The Unit's linguistic background is broad: corpus-based linguistics, lexicography, applied linguistics, the study of modern English language, modern languages, TEFL. Activities include:
1989-ongoing: automated summarisation system.
1990-93: the AVIATOR (Analysis of Verbal Interaction and Automated Text Retrieval) Project: automated system for the identification of new words and new uses of existing words.
1994-97: the ACRONYM (Automatic Collocational Retrieval of 'Nyms') Project: automated system to identify semantically related words, the thesaurus, and alternative search terms.
1997-2000: the APRIL (Analysis and Prediction of Innovation in the Lexicon) Project: automated system of classification for rare new words in text. Sample new word listings are available on our neologisms page.
2000-2004: the SHARES Project: automated system for the retrieval of similar documents.
2000-ongoing: the WebCorp Project: tools to access the web and treat its textual content as a linguistic resource. We went on to build the WebCorp Linguist's Search Engine to improve performance and are now in the process of introducing this to students at school level.
2006-2009: the Repulsion project: the investigation of an organising force in text
News
October 2009: RDUES secures AHRC research project worth £92k to develop WebCorpLSE as a learning resource for use at secondary school level. [More Details]