What a start to ICAME 47! 🎉

After a full day of pre-conference workshops yesterday, our welcoming session opened with words from University President Prof. Dr. Wehner and Faculty 2 Dean Prof. Dr. Neuhaus, before JProf. Andreas Weilinghoff got things officially flowing 🌊

We then dove straight into the deep end with our first plenary talk by Laurence Anthony, exploring this year’s conference motto ‘Confluentes’ — where AI and corpus linguistics meet. While corpus linguistics and generative AI share deep roots, they diverge significantly in how they handle data, interaction, and transparency. Anthony made a compelling case for how integrating AI into established corpus tools like AntConc (which he developed) can bridge that gap, opening new possibilities for multimodal analysis while keeping transparency and validity in focus.

Day 1 is off to a great start – more to come!