Adam Kilgarriff Prize: announcement of winner

On behalf of the Trustees of the Adam Kilgarriff Prize, I am delighted to announce that the inaugural Prize has been awarded to Pawel Rutkowski of the University of Warsaw. Dr. Rutkowski heads up a team which has developed (and continues to develop) a large annotated corpus of Polish sign language and the fully corpus-based Dictionary of Polish Sign Language.

We were impressed by the ambition of this major project, by the thoughtfulness and ingenuity with which it was planned and designed, and by the professional and rigorous way in which these plans have been implemented. In addition to its intrinsic merits, the project has a number of socially and educationally valuable spinoffs, including multimedia adaptations of school textbooks for children with special educational needs. Dr. Rutkowski’s application clearly met all the criteria listed on the Prize website. We congratulate him, and we feel confident that our friend and colleague Adam would have been as impressed and excited by this project as we have been.

The Adam Kilgarriff Prize, announced earlier this year, has got off to a great start. We received eight high-quality applications, and the judging process was long and challenging. In the end our decision was unanimous, but we were very impressed by all the applications, and we would like to thank the other applicants very warmly, not least for giving us the opportunity to learn more about the interesting work they are doing.

Michael Rundell
On behalf of the Trustees of the Adam Kilgarriff Prize