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
<http://www.plm.uw.edu.pl/en/node/241> and the fully corpus-based Dictionary of
Polish Sign Language <http://www.slownikpjm.uw.edu.pl/en>.
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
