#RC21 Laurence Anthony: AI-Assisted Concordancing: From Search Support to Pattern Profiling

Join us for the RC21 Project Symposium, where invited speakers and project team members will present their work on methodology and applications of concordance analysis!

Laurence Anthony: »AI-Assisted Concordancing: From Search Support to Pattern Profiling«

Abstract:
 
Laurence Anthony: AI-Assisted Concordancing: From Search Support to Pattern Profiling
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of daily life, transforming how we work, learn, and interact. Tools like ChatGPT are now widely used for tasks such as writing assistance, text summarization, translation, and programming support. AI is also playing an increasingly important role in research, education, and language learning, where researchers are starting to use it to analyze and visualize complex data, teachers are using it to research topics and create personalized teaching materials, and learners are using it as a personalized tutor, providing them with tailored feedback and interactive language practice.

In this presentation, I will explore how AI can potentially revolutionize concordancing. First, I will examine innovative ways that AI can support concordance search query formulation, including those involving complex regex expressions. I will then introduce methods for profiling concordance results, for example, through AI-assisted grouping and interpretation of patterns. I will also discuss the importance of critically reviewing the output of AI-tools, using concordancing to verify possibly hallucinated language rules, patterns, examples, and insights.

I will demonstrate the potential of AI-assisted concordancing using a new version of the AntConc corpus toolkit, which integrates both commercial and free-to-use large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs). The hope is that these enhancements can enable researchers, teachers, and learners to harness the full potential of concordancing.