The Corpus Center for Advanced Studies & Applications(CCASA) delineates a groundbreaking collaboration between the Department of English at Emerson University, Multan, Pakistan, and the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications (ICSA) at the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), China.
In essence, the project comprises multiple research initiatives housed within the framework of this envisioned Corpus Center. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between these universities encompasses all members at both centers, fostering an expansion of resource bases and mutual benefits.
The collaboration spans diverse domains, including research, development, education, training, and the long-term propagation of knowledge, emphasizing the university’s pivotal role in knowledge transfer and information sharing. The areas of mutual interest for collaboration are broad, spanning contemporary networking techniques, reciprocity enhancement, and the dissemination of investigative capacity, new methodologies, and technologies.
The project aligns with the “Languages Documentation Program,” aiming to maximize the reuse and secondary use of audiovisual, annotated language and textual data. The Corpus Center will establish quality standards and curation criteria for various reuse scenarios, such as ‘Language Documentation,’ ‘Learner Corpora,’ ‘Interpreted Corpora,’ ‘Sign Language,’ ‘Language Community,’ ‘Ethnography,’ and ‘Oral History.’ This initiative seeks to enhance linguistic research capacity in Language Data Science and Applications, Humanities/Social Sciences, Linguistics and Literature, and English Language Teaching/Learning.
In the dynamic landscape of competitive academia, Emerson University Multan recognizes the imperative to enhance its research program offerings, regional competitiveness, cost efficiency, and the robustness of its research initiatives, aligning with the burgeoning emphasis on Corpus Studies. In response to the evolving academic landscape, Emerson University, Multan, has initiated the establishment of corpus centers, amplifying the scope of research at advanced levels. With only a few universities currently offering corpus centers in Pakistan, considerable potential exists for attracting a substantial number of students and researchers to engage in various programs related to corpus studies at Emerson University Multan. This trend aligns with the evolving academic landscape and positions Emerson University Multan as a frontrunner in catering to the increasing demand for advanced research in corpus studies.
The Corpus Center aims to:
- Excel in research through diverse research activities.
- Create opportunities for funded research projects in collaboration with municipal, national, and international organizations.
- Serve as an authentic source for storing spoken and written language data for communicative and research purposes.
- Develop the orthography of unwritten languages.
- Preserve endangered languages and revitalize those near extinction.
- Propose innovative language teaching methods and create appropriate materials.
- Establish frameworks for teaching/learning grammar and vocabulary.
- Pave the way for computational linguistics in Pakistan.
- Develop spoken language data corpora.
- Innovate search methods and data utilization for research.
- Develop advanced software and web applications for natural language and speech processing, fostering the systematic growth of corpora and related fields.
The corpus center is designed to support big data and corpus analysis tools in research, teaching, and learning. Noteworthy features include:
- Collaboration across corpus linguistics, natural language processing, translation studies, and other interdisciplinary domains.
- A focus on the intersection of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, literary stylistics, and statistics within corpus linguistics at EUM.
- Access to diverse corpora, a dedicated computer suite with specialized resources, and an eye-tracking laboratory.
- Contribution to shaping Digital Humanities developments, including developing the web app for corpus linguistic studies of literary texts.
- Organization of conferences, summer schools, workshops, seminars, and symposiums on corpus studies.
- Sharing of corpus methods and training researchers in various tools like Praat, Elan, Wordsmith, Wmatrix, etc.
- Organization of conferences, summer schools, workshops, seminars, and symposiums on corpus studies.
- Sharing of corpus of conferences, summer schools, workshops, seminars, and symposiums on corpus studies.