Geoffrey Sampson

Geoffrey Sampson (born 1944) is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. He produces annotation standards for compiling corpora (databases) of ordinary usage of the English language. He is also a Chartered Information Technology Professional.

His academic career has included work in Asian languages, linguistics, and computing, with side interests in philosophy, and political and economic thought. He lectured at the London School of Economics, the University of Lancaster and the University of Leeds before moving to Sussex in 1991. Some time later he left the Conservative Party and in 2006 joined the United Kingdom Independence Party.

Selection of publications

Monographs The Form of Language (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) Liberty and Language (Oxford, 1979) Making Sense (Oxford, 1980) Schools of Linguistics: Competition and Evolution (Hutchinson, 1980) Writing Systems (Anchor Brenton Ltd., 1985) Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate (Continuum, 1997) Empirical Linguistics (Continuum, 2001)

Essays "From central embedding to corpus linguistics" in Using Corpora for Language Research (Longman, 1996)

Articles "What was transformational grammar?" Lingua 48 (1979): 355–78. "Popperian language-acquisition undefeated". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980): 63–67.

"Depth in English grammar". Journal of Linguistics 33 (1997): 131–51. "Grammatical depth: a rejoinder". Computational Linguistics 25 (1999): xx–xx. "Briefly noted – English for the computer: the SUSANNE corpus and analytic scheme". Computational Linguistics 28 (2002): xx–xx. "Word frequency distributions". Computational Linguistics 28 (2002): xx–xx. "The myth of diminishing firms". Communications of the ACM 46 (2003): xx–xx. "A test of the leaf-ancestor metric for parse accuracy" Natural Language Engineering 9 (2003): xx–xx. [with Anna Babarczy] "Definitional, personal, and mechanical constraints on part of speech annotation performance". Natural Language Engineering 12 (2006): xx–xx. [with Anna Babarczy and John Carroll (not John M Carroll)]

Reviews Steven Pinker, Words and Rules for Times Higher Education Supplement 12 May (2000): 22–23.