The Freiburg – LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB)

The Freiburg – LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB) contains texts from 1991.

Like the original Brown and LOB corpora, FLOB contains 500 texts of around 2000 words each, distributed across 15 text categories.

In 1991 a group of students at Freiburg University were engaged in what at first sight must appear as an almost anachronistic activity: they were keying in extracts of roughly 2,000 words from British newspapers. The sampling model was the press section of the LOB corpus. 1992 saw the beginning of a new Brown corpus. The ultimate aim was to compile parallel one-million-word corpora of the early 1990s that matched the original LOB and Brown corpora as closely as possible, and that would thus provide linguists with an empirical basis to study language change in progress.

The main aim in compiling the press section of FLOB was to match the 1991 material as closely as possible with that used in LOB by sampling the same newspapers. For the other sections, the same magazines and periodicals used in LOB were sampled whenever possible. In the sampling of monographs great care was taken to select books on equivalent topics rather than to randomly select titles from bibliographical sources. The main aim was to achieve close comparability with FLOB rather than statistical representativeness.