Crow Corpus and MACAWS Update

Both the Crow and  MACAWS corpora have had many exciting updates in recent months. With a great many achievements being made and goals being worked towards it is important to take a moment to highlight and recognize the hard work of many of our crowbirds.  

Crow Corpus

The Crow Corpus has now been updated through Summer 2022 at University of Arizona thanks to the work of Bernard Brefo Cassie, Gözde Durgut, Dilara Avci, Alona Kladieva and Wei XuWei. New Purdue files have been added and deidentified by Sarah Buwick and Naomi Islas. Along with updated NAU files based on reclassification by Larissa Goulart and Randi Reppen. WIth these additions the corpus now has 1698 texts, over 18 million words and has over 10,000 views since the summer of 2022. 

The Crow Corpus will continue to be updated and new achievements are constantly being made. Thanks to the diligent work of so many crowsbirds new texts will be added and the number of words will continue to rise even higher! 

MACAWS

Since Summer 2020 the MACAWS team has worked extensively to create and implement materials created with the MACAWS corpus. To date, they  have shared over 20 materials for Portuguese and Russian language classrooms on their website, notably adding spoken corpus materials in Summer 2023. These materials have been implemented by over 15 instructors, not only at University of Arizona but at other institutions. They have also received feedback from over 365 students.

Looking forward the MACAWS team is starting work on a Chinese and Spanish learner corpus. It is two previous Crow interns, Dr. Chen Chen and Yuwei Wang who actually created a Chinese learner corpus after their internship with Crow. The MACAWS team are now working to get that corpus into a format that can be shared outside of their institution. Two current interns, Yilei Li and Tianxing Gao, are helping with this process. For the Spanish corpus, Dr. Shelly Staples and Dr. Julieta Fernandez are collaborating on the addition of a Spanish learner corpus. Fernandez is leading the effort with three assistants, Sara Matsumura, Rosie Ezgur, and Katelyn Reinert.