Rita Simpson -- Corpus Linguistics

Rita received her B.A. at Colorado State University (in German), her M.S. in Linguistics at Georgetown University, and her PhD. in Linguistics at the University of Michigan. She is an expert on the Thai language.

Rita approaches the computational linguistic divide from the linguistic side. She first delved into computer speech technology when she developed dialog states, recognition grammars, and production grammars for one of the early conversational email reader products. She has managed a major corpus collection and annotation project at the University of Michigan's English Language Institute, and organized the first symposium of corpus linguists in North America in May of 1999.

While continuing her technical endeavors in C++ and Unix, she is currently focused on SGML/XML and Perl scripting to organize information in text sources for maximum flexibility for a wide variety of potential applications, including speech and information retrieval research, language teaching materials and resources, and research on stylistic differences across different speech genres.

Rita's research interests include both qualitative and quantitative/statistical methods, and she enjoys putting her ideas into writing as well as giving oral presentations.

Selected Publications:

• 2001. Simpson, R. and Swales, M. Corpus Linguistics in North America: Selections from the 1999 Symposium. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• 2001. Simpson, R. and Powell, C. "Collaboration between Corpus Linguists and Digital Librarians," in Simpson and Swales (eds.).
• 2000. Simpson, R., Lucka, B., and Ovens, J. "Methodological Challenges of Planning a Spoken Corpus with Pedagogical Outcomes," in Rethinking Language Pedagogy from a Corpus Perspective: Papers from the Third International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora. Frankfurt:Peter Lang.

Selected Presentations:

• Mar. 2001. North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching, Boston, MA. "Statistical Analysis of Disciplinary Style in Transcripts of Spoken Academic English."
• July 2000. Teaching and Language Corpora, Graz, Austria. "Cross-disciplinary comparisons in a corpus of spoken academic English"
• April 2000. North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching, Flagstaff, AZ. "Adverbial Hedges in Spoken Academic Language: Cross-disciplinary Comparisons and Teaching Applications"
• Mar. 2000. American Association for Applied Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. "Hedging in Academic Speech: Some Findings from MICASE" (with Deanna Poos)