When ‘AntConc’ Met ‘AI’: Laurence Anthony’s Opening Plenary
The main conference programme of ICAME47 opened on 27th May with a captivating one-hour plenary by one of the most celebrated figures in corpus linguistics, Professor Laurence Anthony of Waseda University. Speaking on “Advancing Corpus Linguistics with Small, Local and Multimodal AI Language Models,” he explored how generative AI and modern language models can be brought together with established corpus linguistic methods to open up new avenues of analysis. Professor Anthony, who holds the National Prize of the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies and is best known worldwide for his AntConc software, kept the audience thoroughly engaged throughout. The highlight was a series of live demonstrations in which he used AntConc to analyse multimodal corpora, integrating large language models and other AI tools to show how they can complement the work of a corpus linguist. It was an inspiring and fitting start to the main conference, leaving participants with much to reflect on as the days unfold.