WISERD would like to congratulate our colleagues Professor Tess Fitzpatrick and Dr Dawn Knight, and their time, for recently securing £1.8m in funding from the ESRC for their Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes (National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) project; also known as CorCenCC. The project is funded for 3.5 years and will commence in March 2016.
CorCenCC is an inter-disciplinary and multi-institutional project that will create a large scale, open source corpus of contemporary Welsh language. CorCenCC will break new ground both as a language resource and as a model of corpus construction. It will be the first large-scale corpus of Welsh representative of language use across communication types (circa 4m spoken words, 4m written, 2m e-language), genres, language varieties (regional and social) and contexts, with contributors representative of the 562,000 Welsh speakers in the UK. It will also forge transformative methods for corpus creation, impact and sustainability.
The creation of CorCenCC will be community-driven, harnessing opportunities afforded by mobile technologies, specifically crowdsourcing and community collaboration. Impact will be generated through a user-informed design, so that basic corpus functionalities for the querying of language use can be integrated into a bespoke toolkit for teachers and learners (within this project) and interface specifications for other user groups (e.g. translators, publishers, policy-makers, language technology developers, academics and others) beyond the project.
CorCenCC is funded by the ESRC and AHRC. The project will be led by Dawn Knight, at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University. The academic project team comprises:
- Dawn Knight Cardiff University (School of English, Communication and Philosophy)
- Tess Fitzpatrick Cardiff University (School of English, Communication and Philosophy)
- Irena Spasic Cardiff University (School of Computer Science and Informatics)
- Jeremy Evas Cardiff University (School of Welsh)
- Steve Morris Swansea University (Academi Hywel Teifi)
- Mark Stonelake Swansea University (Academi Hywel Teifi)
- Paul Rayson Lancaster University (School of Computing and Communications)
- Enlli Thomas Bangor University (School of Education)
Other contributors and collaborators include computer programmers, Welsh language experts and a range of external stakeholders including the Welsh Government, National Assembly for Wales, Welsh Joint Education Committee, Welsh for Adults, Gwasg y Lolfa, and University of Wales Dictionary of the Welsh Language.
For further information contact: Dawn Knight (Principal Investigator) KnightD5@cardiff.ac.uk