Cànan launches PhraseBox™ In Montreal



The picture shows (back, l-r and front, l-r): Patricia Kemp, Paddy Patterson (LT Scotland); Professor John Sinclair (Tuscan Word Centre); Professor Ian Hunt (Cànan); Jim Henderson (LT Scotland), Evan Brown (Cànan) and Donella Beaton (Cànan).

Cànan, the Isle of Skye-based communications company, has just previewed a ground-breaking search engine product at North America’s biggest linguistics conference.

The product preview version of PhraseBox™ - a powerful and easy-to-use corpus-based search tool - was on show in Montreal last weekend, where it was viewed by over 1200 expert delegates from around the world.

The resource provides examples of real, practical language for those seeking to improve their use of vocabulary and grammar. It allows learners to access millions of words at the touch of a key, to summarise the regular uses of phrases in sentences, to examine how phrases are put together and to explore word usage and phraseological patterns.

PhraseBox™, commissioned by Learning and Teaching Scotland (LT Scotland), has been developed by Cànan, with expert advice from Professor John Sinclair. Professor Sinclair, President of the Tuscan Word Centre, is acknowledged as the world’s foremost expert in corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

The software can presently search over 200 million words of text from various sources and it provides a high degree of flexibility. Users can select different methods for filtering, ranking and displaying results – which helps to give an accurate and engaging picture of just how words work together.

PhraseBox™ also enables people to compare and contrast language usage in different genres, for instance, by searching corpora from both broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, or examples drawn from different eras.

John M Sinclair, outlining the benefits of the resource said:
“With PhraseBox, students and learners can have access to the stored patterns of hundreds of millions of words as they are used today. It transforms the dimensions of language resources and empowers the humblest learner with access to a lifetime’s experience of language at a touch of a key.”

PhraseBox is designed to be language neutral, so the software can be employed in any of the world’s languages. PhraseBox will be launched in late 2006.

Information for Editors

1. PhraseBox ™ was launched in Montreal by representatives of Cànan, LT Scotland and Professor Sinclair. Cànan’s representatives in Montreal were Donella Beaton, Chief Executive; Evan Brown, Software Developer; and Professor Ian Hunt, Director. Cànan’s research and software development department comprises of Chris Mitchell and Evan Brown.

2. The annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) and the Association Canadienne de Linguistique Appliquée/Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics (ACLA/CAAL) was held in Montreal from June 17th to 20th attended by over 1000 delegates from around the world

3. John M. Sinclair is Professor Emeritus of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham, where he spent most of his career. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh (MA 1955), where he began his interest in corpus linguistics, stylistics, grammar and discourse analysis. Now living in Italy, he is President of The Tuscan Word Centre. He holds an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Gothenburg (1998), and an Honorary Professorship at the University of Jiao Tong, Shanghai. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and a member of the Academia Europæa. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Cobuild series of language reference materials. Among his recent books are: Reading Concordances (Longman 2003), a textbook; Trust the Text (Routledge 2004), a collection of his papers; English Collocational Studies (Continuum 2004), a record of the first research on electronic corpora of the 1960s; How to use corpora in language teaching, a collection derived from a TWC course, edited by Sinclair (Benjamins 2004).

4. Learning and Teaching Scotland (LT Scotland) is the lead organisation for the development and support of the Scottish curriculum.