The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus is a one-million-word collection of British English texts which was compiled in the 1970s in collaboration between the University of Lancaster, the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, Bergen, to provide a British counterpart to the Brown Corpus compiled by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis for American English in the 1960s.
Its composition was designed to match the original Brown corpus in terms of its size and genres as closely as possible using documents published in the UK in 1961 by British authors.LOB Corpus Manual Both corpora consist of 500 samples each comprising about 2000 words in the following genres: LabelText categoryBrown CorpusLOB CorpusAPress: reportage4444BPress: editorial2727CPress: reviews1717DReligion1717ESkills, trades and hobbies3638FPopular lore4844GBelles lettres, biography, essays7577HMiscellaneous (documents, reports, etc.)3030JLearned and scientific writings8080KGeneral fiction2929LMystery and detective fiction2424MScience fiction66NAdventure and western fiction2929PRomance and love story2929RHumour99 Total500500
The chief compilers of the LOB corpus were Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster University) and Stig Johansson (University of Oslo); see Leech & Johansson (2009).
The corpus has been also tagged, i.e. part-of-speech categories have been assigned to every word.
References
External links
Stig, Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, and Helen Goodluck. "Manual of information to accompany the Lancaster-Oslo : Bergen Corpus of British English, for use with digital computers" Department of English, University of Oslo, (1978). LOB Corpus from the Oxford Text Archive