Web As Corpus


Book Description

Is the internet a suitable linguistic corpus? How can we use it in corpus techniques? What are the special properties that we need to be aware of? This book answers those questions. The Web is an exponentially increasing source of language and corpus linguistics data. From gigantic static information resources to user-generated Web 2.0 content, the breadth and depth of information available is breathtaking – and bewildering. This book explores the theory and practice of the “web as corpus”. It looks at the most common tools and methods used and features a plethora of examples based on the author's own teaching experience. This book also bridges the gap between studies in computational linguistics, which emphasize technical aspects, and studies in corpus linguistics, which focus on the implications for language theory and use.




Corpus Linguistics and the Web


Book Description

Using the Web as Corpus is one of the recent challenges for corpus linguistics. This volume presents a current state-of-the-arts discussion of the topic. The articles address practical problems such as suitable linguistic search tools for accessing the www, the question of register variation, or they probe into methods for culling data from the web. The book also offers a wide range of case studies, covering morphology, syntax, lexis, as well as synchronic and diachronic variation in English. These case studies make use of the two approaches to the www in corpus linguistics - web-as-corpus and web-for-corpus-building. The case studies demonstrate that web data can provide useful additional evidence for a broad range of research questions.




Building and Exploring Web Corpora (WAC3 - 2007)


Book Description

WAC More and more people are using Web data for linguistic and NLP research. The Web as Corpusworkshop (WAC) provides a venue for exploring how we can use it effectively and the advancementsto which this could lead.This book is a collection of the talks presented at the 3 rd WAC in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium).The focus is on the description of Web corpus collection projects, the exploration of Web datacharacteristics from a linguistics/NLP perspective, and on the use of crawled Web data for NLPpurposes. CLEANEVAL Any use of Web data requires that it be cleaned in order to get rid of unwanted material including,for example, HTML markup, navigation bars, advertisements. To date there has been no sharingof resources or expertise in this particular domain and the cleaning has often been done minimally.Cleaneval was an exercise aimed at promoting collaboration and improving our understandingof the issues. Results and perspectives are presented in this book.




Developing Linguistic Corpora


Book Description

A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and brought together so that language can be studied on the computer. Today, corpus linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language, and the impact of this dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making itself felt in many areas of language study. In this volume, a selection of leading experts in various key areas of corpus construction offer advice in a readable and largely non-technical style to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well designed and fit for the intended purpose. This guide is aimed at those who are at some stage of building a linguistic corpus. Little or no knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational procedures is assumed, although it is hoped that more advanced users will find the guidelines here useful. It is also aimed at those who are not building a corpus, but who need to know something about the issues involved in the design of corpora in order to choose between available resources and to help draw conclusions from their studies.




Genres on the Web


Book Description

The volume “Genres on the Web” has been designed for a wide audience, from the expert to the novice. It is a required book for scholars, researchers and students who want to become acquainted with the latest theoretical, empirical and computational advances in the expanding field of web genre research. The study of web genre is an overarching and interdisciplinary novel area of research that spans from corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, NLP, and text-technology, to web mining, webometrics, social network analysis and information studies. This book gives readers a thorough grounding in the latest research on web genres and emerging document types. The book covers a wide range of web-genre focused subjects, such as: • The identification of the sources of web genres • Automatic web genre identification • The presentation of structure-oriented models • Empirical case studies One of the driving forces behind genre research is the idea of a genre-sensitive information system, which incorporates genre cues complementing the current keyword-based search and retrieval applications.




Web Corpus Construction


Book Description

The World Wide Web constitutes the largest existing source of texts written in a great variety of languages. A feasible and sound way of exploiting this data for linguistic research is to compile a static corpus for a given language. There are several adavantages of this approach: (i) Working with such corpora obviates the problems encountered when using Internet search engines in quantitative linguistic research (such as non-transparent ranking algorithms). (ii) Creating a corpus from web data is virtually free. (iii) The size of corpora compiled from the WWW may exceed by several orders of magnitudes the size of language resources offered elsewhere. (iv) The data is locally available to the user, and it can be linguistically post-processed and queried with the tools preferred by her/him. This book addresses the main practical tasks in the creation of web corpora up to giga-token size. Among these tasks are the sampling process (i.e., web crawling) and the usual cleanups including boilerplate removal and removal of duplicated content. Linguistic processing and problems with linguistic processing coming from the different kinds of noise in web corpora are also covered. Finally, the authors show how web corpora can be evaluated and compared to other corpora (such as traditionally compiled corpora). For additional material please visit the companion website: sites.morganclaypool.com/wcc Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Web Corpora / Data Collection / Post-Processing / Linguistic Processing / Corpus Evaluation and Comparison / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies




Text, Speech and Dialogue


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2013, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in September 2014. The 70 papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. They focus on topics such as corpora and language resources; speech recognition; tagging, classification and parsing of text and speech; speech and spoken language generation; semantic processing of text and speech; integrating applications of text and speech processing; automatic dialogue systems; as well as multimodal techniques and modelling.




Translation-Driven Corpora


Book Description

Electronic texts and text analysis tools have opened up a wealth of opportunities to higher education and language service providers, but learning to use these resources continues to pose challenges to scholars and professionals alike. Translation-Driven Corpora aims to introduce readers to corpus tools and methods which may be used in translation research and practice. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of corpus creation and use. An introduction to corpora and overview of applications of corpus linguistics methodologies to translation studies is followed by a discussion of corpus design and acquisition. Different stages and tools involved in corpus compilation and use are outlined, from corpus encoding and annotation to indexing and data retrieval, and the various methods and techniques that allow end users to make sense of corpus data are described. The volume also offers detailed guidelines for the construction and analysis of multilingual corpora. Corpus creation and use are illustrated through practical examples and case studies, with each chapter outlining a set of tasks aimed at guiding researchers, students and translators to practice some of the methods and use some of the resources discussed. These tasks are meant as hands-on activities to be carried out using the materials and links available in an accompanying DVD. Suggested further readings at the end of each chapter are complemented by an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume. Translation-Driven Corpora is designed for use by teachers and students in the classroom or by researchers and professionals for self-learning. It is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this fast growing area of scholarly and professional activity.




Corpus-based Language Studies


Book Description

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.




Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R


Book Description

The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to use the open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve – searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.