This is an exciting time for our understanding of language. Linguists are becoming familiar with corpora, and so the possibilities they offer are now beginning to open up. Language-processing tools like part-of-speech taggers are also now reaching a level of maturity, so we can work with corpora that handle lemmas and grammar, and potentially more, as well as simple word forms. In this talk I will sketch out the empiricist programme, illustrating it with "word sketches", one-page summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour, and distributional thesauruses. If time permits, I shall also describe some of the issues arising when we use the largest and most easily available source of data, the Web (or some parts of it) as our corpus

Dr. Adam Kilgarriff is a research scientist working at the intersection of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and dictionary-making. Following a PhD on “Polysemy” from Sussex University, he has worked at Longman Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, and the University of Brighton, and is now Director of two companies, Lexicography MasterClass Ltd (http://www.lexmasterclass.com) and Lexical Computing Limited (http://www.sketchengine.co.uk ) and a Visiting Research Fellow at Sussex. Dr. Kilgarriff started the SENSEVAL initiative to evaluate word sense isambiguation systems and is now active in moves to make the web available as a linguists’ corpus. He is a Board member of EURALEX (European Association for exicography), former president of ACL-SIGLEX (Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on the Lexicon).