Corpus linguistics has made spectacular advances since the early 1960s when computer corpora were first made available for research. The use of corpora has spread to practically every branch of linguistics and has become indispensable in many practical applications of linguistic research, from lexicography and
terminology extraction to information retrieval and computer-assisted translation. Corpora have become bigger and more diversified: apart from large generalpurpose corpora, a number of specialised corpora are now being used for research in such areas as historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, LSP,
interlanguage research, contrastive linguistics and translation studies. In addition, CD-ROM newspaper collections and the Internet have become increasingly important resources for language study. Hand in hand with these developments a variety of research tools have been created for exploring, annotating and
processing language data in various ways.