Corpora: Brill's vs. CLAWS

[Veronika Koller]

Dear list members,
without wanting to trigger a bi-partisan discussion, I would still like to
inquire about the advantages of Brill's tagger over CLAWS tagging service
or vice versa. The situation at our department leading to this question is
the following:
So far, we have only worked with Cobuild's Bank of English and
self-compiled corpora, using WordSmith Tools as a concordance program for
the latter. Currently, however, we are planning to obtain several other
corpora such as the BNC (incl. SARA), the Wolverhampton Corpus of Business
English (by the way: what kind of concordance program would work best with
that?) and ICE-GB (incl. ICE-CUP). We have had texts tagged by CLAWS and
the result proved to be quite useful for our purposes. Since we would very
much like to streamline our software resources as much as possible (which
doesn't seem to be much anyway), we'd rather know about the respective
(dis)advantages in advance. A helpful starting point might e.g. be if
someone could provide a sample text tagged with the help of Brill's.

Your help will be much appreciated and a summary will be posted.

Regards,
Veronika Koller
Mag.a Veronika Koller
Department of English/Business English
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Augasse 9
A-1090 Vienna
Tel.: 43/1/31336-4068
Fax: 43/1/31336-747