NaijaSynCor Masterclass: Training on IT Tools for Electronic Corpus Annotation

From Monday 13^th to Friday 17^th of November 2017, Prof. Bernard Caron (Llacan-IFRA Nigeria), Prof. Francis Eghbokhare (University of Ibadan) and the Post-Graduate School of the University of Ibadan co-organised the Masterclass “Training on IT Tools for Electronic Corpus Annotation” at the Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan.

The event attracted 27 participants, among them Master and PhD students in linguistics from various universities in Nigeria (Abia, Benin, Calabar, Ibadan, Nassarawa, Port-Harcourt, Uyo) along with international senior researchers in Linguistics.

The Masterclass aimed at providing theoretical and empirical training on the command of tools used for electronic corpus annotation in linguistics. Speakers included Prof. Bernard Caron Prof. Anne Lacheret, Prof. Sylvain Kahane, L. Liu (Modyco, Université Paris Nanterre), Dr. Candide Simar (SOAS London) and Abiola Oyelere, researcher of the NaijaSynCor team. The training started with a presentation of the NaijaSynCor project. It was followed by a theoretical investigation of prosody and a training on softwares for professional treatment of phonetics (PRAAT), web log analysis (Analor), and prosody (Prosody Pro). A presentation on syntax annotation ensued, with a particular emphasis on criteria and methods of elaboration of syntax annotations programmes at the macro and micro-levels. Finally, speakers turned to the topic of semantic annotation.

Prof. Lacheret teaching on softwares for electronic corpus annotation

All the masterclass participants relaxing after the programme

Participants listening to the theoretical component of the programme