Which English dominates the world wide web, British or American?
Eric Atwell, Junaid Arshad, C-M Lai, L Nim, N Rezapour Ashregi, Jiani Wang, J Washtell · White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) · 2007
This paper reports the results of an experiment to combine research and teaching in Corpus Linguistics, using an AI-inspired intelligent agent architecture, but casting students as the intelligent agents (Atwell 2007). Computing students studying Computational Modelling and Technologies for Knowledge Management were given the data-mining coursework task of harvesting and analysing a Data Warehouse from WWW, using WWW-BootCat web-as-corpus technology (Baroni et al 2006). Each student/agent collected English-language web-pages from a specific national top-level domain, and the analysis task involved comparing their national web-as-corpus with given “gold standard” samples from UK and US domains, to assess whether national WWW English terminology/ontology was closer to UK or US English. Results from 93 countries worldwide were collated to give an overview answer to the question: Which English dominates the World Wide Web, British or American?