Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora

Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora
Author: Jesse Egbert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2022-04-14
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1107151384

This volume introduces a new framework for conceptualizing and achieving corpus representativeness in a rigorous, yet practical way.

Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora

Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora
Author: Jesse Egbert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2022-04-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1009254758

Corpora are ubiquitous in linguistic research, yet to date, there has been no consensus on how to conceptualize corpus representativeness and collect corpus samples. This pioneering book bridges this gap by introducing a conceptual and methodological framework for corpus design and representativeness. Written by experts in the field, it shows how corpora can be designed and built in a way that is both optimally suited to specific research agendas, and adequately representative of the types of language use in question. It considers questions such as 'what types of texts should be included in the corpus?', and 'how many texts are required?' – highlighting that the degree of representativeness rests on the dual pillars of domain considerations and distribution considerations. The authors introduce, explain, and illustrate all aspects of this corpus representativeness framework in a step-by-step fashion, using examples and activities to help readers develop practical skills in corpus design and evaluation.

Developing Linguistic Corpora

Developing Linguistic Corpora
Author: Martin Wynne
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2005
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

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.

Analysing Representation

Analysing Representation
Author: Frazer Heritage
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 104001898X

Analysing Representation: A Corpus and Discourse Textbook guides readers through the process of researching how people and phenomena are represented in discourse and introduces them to key tools they can use from corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis. This book takes a step-by-step approach to introducing each concept and includes exercises and further reading to help readers check their progress and prepare for independent research. It is unique in introducing readers to a range of experts representing the full range of work in this area. This book is aimed at final-year undergraduate, taught postgraduate and doctoral level students. It wil also be useful to scholars who are new to combining corpus and discourse methods in investigations of representation.

Multi-Dimensional Analysis

Multi-Dimensional Analysis
Author: Tony Berber Sardinha
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1350023833

Multi-Dimensional Analysis: Research Methods and Current Issues provides a comprehensive guide both to the statistical methods in Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) and its key elements, such as corpus building, tagging, and tools. The major goal is to explain the steps involved in the method so that readers may better understand this complex research framework and conduct MD research on their own. Multi-Dimensional Analysis is a method that allows the researcher to describe different registers (textual varieties defined by their social use) such as academic settings, regional discourse, social media, movies, and pop songs. Through multivariate statistical techniques, MDA identifies complementary correlation groupings of dozens of variables, including variables which belong both to the grammatical and semantic domains. Such groupings are then associated with situational variables of texts like information density, orality, and narrativity to determine linguistic constructs known as dimensions of variation, which provide a scale for the comparison of a large number of texts and registers. This book is a comprehensive research guide to MDA.

Doing Linguistics with a Corpus

Doing Linguistics with a Corpus
Author: Jesse Egbert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108897037

Paradoxically, doing corpus linguistics is both easier and harder than it has ever been before. On the one hand, it is easier because we have access to more existing corpora, more corpus analysis software tools, and more statistical methods than ever before. On the other hand, reliance on these existing corpora and corpus linguistic methods can potentially create layers of distance between the researcher and the language in a corpus, making it a challenge to do linguistics with a corpus. The goal of this Element is to explore ways for us to improve how we approach linguistic research questions with quantitative corpus data. We introduce and illustrate the major steps in the research process, including how to: select and evaluate corpora, establish linguistically-motivated research questions, observational units and variables, select linguistically interpretable variables, understand and evaluate existing corpus software tools, adopt minimally sufficient statistical methods, and qualitatively interpret quantitative findings.

Teaching and Language Corpora

Teaching and Language Corpora
Author: Anne Wichmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1317889584

Corpora are well-established as a resource for language research; they are now also increasingly being used for teaching purposes. This book is the first of its kind to deal explicitly and in a wide-ranging way with the use of corpora in teaching. It contains an extensive collection of articles by corpus linguists and practising teachers, covering not only the use of data to inform and create teaching materials but also the direct exploitation of corpora by students, both in the study of linguistics in general and in the acquisition of proficiency in individual languages, including English, Welsh, German, French and Italian. In addition, the book offers practical information on the sources of corpora and concordances, including those suitable for work on non-roman scripts such as Greek and Cyrillic.

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication
Author: Gavin Brookes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1003819796

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication provides an accessible and practical introduction to the use of corpus linguistics methods to analyse health-related language use across various contexts and genres. Offering a critical review of the field, discussion of extended case studies, and practical exercises based on spoken, written, and digital language data, this book: introduces the fields of health communication and corpus linguistics and critically reviews cutting-edge studies in the burgeoning area of corpus-based health communication; describes the processes involved in planning a corpus linguistics study of health communication, including designing and building a corpus, selecting tools, and implementing techniques of analysis; demonstrates how corpus linguistics methods can – and have – been applied to the study of spoken, written, and digital health communication, offering critical reflections and suggesting areas for future development. Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication is essential reading for those working at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication. Both those with a little or a lot of experience in either field will find value in its pages.

Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning

Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning
Author: Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-05-15
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9027268711

In recent years, corpora have found their way into language instruction, albeit often indirectly, through their role in syllabus and course design and in the production of teaching materials and other resources. An alternative and more innovative use is for teachers and students alike to explore corpus data directly as part of the learning process. This volume addresses this latter application of corpora by providing research insights firmly based in the classroom context and reporting on several state-of-the-art projects around the world where learners have direct access to corpus resources and tools and utilize them to improve their control of the language systems and skills or their professional expertise as translators. Its aim is to present recent advances in data-driven learning, addressing issues involving different types of corpora, for different learner profiles, in different ways for different purposes, and using a variety of different research methodologies and perspectives.

Corpus Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics
Author: Douglas Biber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1998-04-23
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780521499576

An investigation into the way people use language in speech and writing, this volume introduces the corpus-based approach, which is based on analysis of large databases of real language examples stored on computer.