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Stephen Jeaco

Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

 

Abstract

Professor Mark Davies created the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), making a huge contribution to English language description and teaching, providing fresh insights into differences between British and American English, changes over time, and contrasts across genres. He also developed a corpus architecture and corpus tool interface that provides easy yet powerful access to COCA and a host of other structured corpora. In an interview recorded a few weeks after the addition of Artificial Intelligence features across the English-Corpora.org platform, Professor Davies discusses the development of his corpora and his interface over the last two decades. He provides examples of how corpora have been and continue to be extremely useful for English language learning and teaching. The interview also includes some discussion of how and why the AI functions were developed, touching on some key considerations for prompt design and one's general approach to language data. The interview concludes with a summary of insights and recommendations, including a call to keep data front-and-center and to promote active learning through AI-assisted discovery.

 

Keywords

Corpus design, artificial intelligence, AI assisted corpus analysis, supporting second language learners