Grant success for our Professor Lesley Jeffries
Fri, 29 Nov 2013 15:36:00 GMT
The project is called 'Semantic Annotation and Mark Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches (SAMUELS)' and is run by Dr Marc Alexander of the University of Glasgow. He is producing an automatic process for 'tagging' (labelling) the words in a large corpus with the right meanings, drawing on the Historical Thesaurus of English, with the result that corpus searching of data will become more focussed and meaningful.
The Huddersfield project, entitled Is There a Baron in the Commons?, is one of four running at different universities that are designed to test the efficacy of the tagger. It will examine semantic collocates, (instances where one set of meanings is often found alongside another set of meanings) in Hansard.
This builds on previous work by Professor Jeffries and Dr Brian Walker on the representation of trade unions in the UK press. This project searches Hansard for collocates of semantic categories referring to trade unions (labour relations etc) and will have the capacity to demonstrate the changing representation of unions over time by parliamentarians.
