The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus is a one-million-word collection of British English texts which was compiled in the 1970s in collaboration between the University of Lancaster, the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, Bergen, to provide a British counterpart to the Brown Corpus compiled by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis for American English in the 1960s.
Its composition was designed to match the original Brown corpus in terms of its size and genres as closely as possible using documents published in the UK in 1961 by British authors.[1] Both corpora consist of 500 samples each comprising about 2000 words in the following genres:
| Label | Text category | Brown Corpus | LOB Corpus | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Press: reportage | 44 | 44 | |
| B | Press: editorial | 27 | 27 | |
| C | Press: reviews | 17 | 17 | |
| D | Religion | 17 | 17 | |
| E | Skills, trades and hobbies | 36 | 38 | |
| F | Popular lore | 48 | 44 | |
| G | Belles lettres, biography, essays | 75 | 77 | |
| H | Miscellaneous (documents, reports, etc.) | 30 | 30 | |
| J | Learned and scientific writings | 80 | 80 | |
| K | General fiction | 29 | 29 | |
| L | Mystery and detective fiction | 24 | 24 | |
| M | Science fiction | 6 | 6 | |
| N | Adventure and western fiction | 29 | 29 | |
| P | Romance and love story | 29 | 29 | |
| R | Humour | 9 | 9 | |
| Total | 500 | 500 |
The corpus has been also tagged, i.e. part-of-speech categories have been assigned to every word.[2]