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International Corpus of English
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Team History

Since 2001, when Barbara Seidlhofer launched VOICE as a pilot lingua franca corpus, many students and academics have been contributing to the success of the VOICE project.

Angelika Breiteneder

Angelika Breiteneder

Angelika Breiteneder studied English and Psychology/Philosophy/Pedagogy as well as German as a foreign language at the University of Vienna. In autumn 2003, she spent a semester at the University of Nottingham on an ERASMUS scholarship. Angelika Breiteneder joined the VOICE team in March 2004 and worked for the VOICE project as a full time researcher from June 2005 until August 2010.

In her MA thesis, she focused on ELF in Europe and assessed ‘the case of the third person -s’ to illustrate that ELF is not a ‘learner language’ but a ‘user language’ like any other.

Angelika Breiteneder has published on topics such as the situation of ELF in Europe, the usage of the 'third person -s' in ELF talk, and challenging issues in corpus linguistics and World Englishes and is working on her PhD thesis which explores the question of appropriate perspectives for a successful ELF pedagogy.

Theresa Klimpfinger

Theresa Klimpfinger

Theresa Klimpfinger studied English and Spanish at the University of Vienna.She joined the VOICE team in July 2004 and worked as a researcher for the VOICE project from November 2005 to June 2009.

In her MA thesis, she focused on the role of speakers' first and other languages in ELF talk, this way demonstrating that ELF speakers exploit the multilingual resources they have at their disposal in order to fulfil different discourse functions, to apply certain communication strategies, and to communicate their multilingual identity.

Theresa has published on aspects of code-switching in ELF and methodological challenges in the compilation of a corpus of spoken ELF.

Michael Radeka

Michael Radeka

Michael Radeka studied German as a foreign language and Computational Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. In his MA thesis he approached parallel transformation-based learning as a general error-correction and classifier combination system. During his studies, Michael taught German as a foreign language at various schools in Heidelberg. Moreover, he worked on upgrading and the maintenance of the German Reference-Corpus (DEREKO) at the Institute for German Language (Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS)) Mannheim.

Michael worked as a researcher for the VOICE project from August 2010 to November 2012. His research interests focussed on developing a methodology for annotating VOICE with POS tags, which is also the topic of his PhD thesis.

Julia Lichtkoppler

From July 2006 to September 2008, Julia worked as an assistant to Barbara Seidlhofer at the English Department of the University of Vienna and in this capacity has supported the VOICE team in the processing and preparation of data.

Kathrin Kordon

Between March and July 2006, Kathrin Kordon worked as an assistant to Barbara Seidlhofer at the English Department of Vienna University and in this capacity supported the VOICE team in the collection of data.

Manual part-of-speech tagging

VOICE data is spoken, highly interactive and contains non-canonical language use. As automatic POS-taggers were not designed to deal with such data, much of the data had to be tagged manually, which was only feasible with help of additional personnel. This team consisted of the following people:

Anonymization of audio files

In order to make the selected audio material available, all sensitive content had to be anonymized. The location of such sensitive content in the audio files is a laborious process, requiring great precision. This was carried out by the following people:

Transcription Team

The compilation of a corpus of spoken language is a time-consuming task, particularly when it comes to transcribing English as a lingua franca. In order to capture its unique ‘non-standard’ characteristics, ELF speech requires specific transcription conventions, which presents transcribers with a laborious and challenging assignment.

Considering the complex nature of transcribing ELF, the VOICE project assigns the task of first-draft transcripts to a number of experienced students and academics. The following people have worked as transcribers for VOICE:

Further Contributors

These committed, and often honorary, team members have supported the VOICE project by offering their expertise, experience and time during several team meetings in the past.

The VOICE team would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Constanze Hauser, Kathrin Kordon and Ulrike Pölzl, who assisted in the design of the first VOICE transcription conventions and helped to lay the foundations for the present VOICE corpus. Special thanks also go to Ulrike Keitsch for her valuable comments contributing to the progress of the VOICE project. Additionally, appreciation should be noted for Thomas Strasser, who provided technical expertise and thus complemented the VOICE team. Furthermore, we thank Stefan Dollinger, who took responsibility for designing the first version of the VOICE website.