He initiated the first electronic corpus of British English, completed in 1978 as the [Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus|Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen] (LOB) Corpus. Later, in the 1990s, he took a leading role in the compilation of the British National Corpus (BNC). The Lancaster research group that he co-founded (UCREL) also developed programs for the annotation of corpora: especially corpus taggers and parsers.
He initiated the first electronic corpus of British English, finished in 1978 as the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus. Later, in the 1990s, he took a leading role in compiling the British National Corpus (BNC). The research group that he co-founded (UCREL) also developed programs for annotating corpora: particularly corpus taggers and parsers.