Text corpus

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In linguistics and natural language processing, a corpus (PL: corpora) or text corpus is a dataset, consisting of natively digital and older, digitalized, language resources, either annotated or unannotated.

Contents

Annotated, they have been used in corpus linguistics for statistical hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules within a specific language territory.

In search technology, a corpus is the collection of documents which is being searched.

Overview

A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpus) or text data in multiple languages (multilingual corpus).

In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known as annotation. An example of annotating a corpus is part-of-speech tagging, or POS-tagging, in which information about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in the form of tags. Another example is indicating the lemma (base) form of each word. When the language of the corpus is not a working language of the researchers who use it, interlinear glossing is used to make the annotation bilingual.

Some corpora have further structured levels of analysis applied. In particular, smaller corpora may be fully parsed. Such corpora are usually called Treebanks or Parsed Corpora. The difficulty of ensuring that the entire corpus is completely and consistently annotated means that these corpora are usually smaller, containing around one to three million words. Other levels of linguistic structured analysis are possible, including annotations for morphology, semantics and pragmatics.

Applications

Corpora are the main knowledge base in corpus linguistics. Other notable areas of application include:

Some notable text corpora

See also

Related Research Articles

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.

Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and linguistics. It is primarily concerned with giving computers the ability to support and manipulate speech. It involves processing natural language datasets, such as text corpora or speech corpora, using either rule-based or probabilistic machine learning approaches. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves.

Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference.

Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to conscious attention when ambiguity impairs clarity of communication, given the pervasive polysemy in natural language. In computational linguistics, it is an open problem that affects other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parallel text</span> Text placed alongside its translation or translations

A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library are two examples of dual-language series of texts. Reference Bibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study; Origen's Hexapla placed six versions of the Old Testament side by side. A famous example is the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery allowed the Ancient Egyptian language to begin being deciphered.

In corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging, also called grammatical tagging is the process of marking up a word in a text (corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its definition and its context. A simplified form of this is commonly taught to school-age children, in the identification of words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

The American National Corpus (ANC) is a text corpus of American English containing 22 million words of written and spoken data produced since 1990. Currently, the ANC includes a range of genres, including emerging genres such as email, tweets, and web data that are not included in earlier corpora such as the British National Corpus. It is annotated for part of speech and lemma, shallow parse, and named entities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treebank</span>

In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data.

Linguistic categories include

The International Corpus of English(ICE) is a set of corpora representing varieties of English from around the world. Over twenty countries or groups of countries where English is the first language or an official second language are included.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eckhard Bick</span> German Esperantist

Eckhard Bick is a German-born Esperantist who studied medicine in Bonn but now works as a researcher in computational linguistics. He was active in an Esperanto youth group in Bonn and in the Germana Esperanto-Junularo, a nationwide Esperanto youth federation. Since his marriage to a Danish woman he and his family live in Denmark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quranic Arabic Corpus</span>

The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated linguistic resource consisting of 77,430 words of Quranic Arabic. The project aims to provide morphological and syntactic annotations for researchers wanting to study the language of the Quran.

SemEval is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantic analysis systems; it evolved from the Senseval word sense evaluation series. The evaluations are intended to explore the nature of meaning in language. While meaning is intuitive to humans, transferring those intuitions to computational analysis has proved elusive.

Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG - INitiative (DELPH-IN) is a collaboration where computational linguists worldwide develop natural language processing tools for deep linguistic processing of human language. The goal of DELPH-IN is to combine linguistic and statistical processing methods in order to computationally understand the meaning of texts and utterances.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sketch Engine</span> Corpus manager and text analysis software

Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in 90+ languages.

Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) is a balanced subset of 500K words of written texts and transcribed speech drawn primarily from the Open American National Corpus (OANC). The OANC is a 15 million word corpus of American English produced since 1990, all of which is in the public domain or otherwise free of usage and redistribution restrictions.

In natural language processing, linguistics, and neighboring fields, Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) describes a method and an interdisciplinary community concerned with creating, sharing, and (re-)using language resources in accordance with Linked Data principles. The Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud was conceived and is being maintained by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation, but has been a point of focal activity for several W3C community groups, research projects, and infrastructure efforts since then.

Universal Dependencies, frequently abbreviated as UD, is an international cooperative project to create treebanks of the world's languages. These treebanks are openly accessible and available. Core applications are automated text processing in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and research into natural language syntax and grammar, especially within linguistic typology. The project's primary aim is to achieve cross-linguistic consistency of annotation, while still permitting language-specific extensions when necessary. The annotation scheme has it roots in three related projects: Stanford Dependencies, Google universal part-of-speech tags, and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets. The UD annotation scheme uses a representation in the form of dependency trees as opposed to a phrase structure trees. At the present time, there are just over 200 treebanks of more than 100 languages available in the UD inventory.

In linguistics and language technology, a language resource is a "[composition] of linguistic material used in the construction, improvement and/or evaluation of language processing applications, (...) in language and language-mediated research studies and applications."

References

  1. Yoon, H., & Hirvela, A. (2004). ESL Student Attitudes toward Corpus Use in L2 Writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(4), 257–283. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
  2. Wołk, K.; Marasek, K. (7 April 2014). "Real-Time Statistical Speech Translation". New Perspectives in Information Systems and Technologies, Volume 1. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing. Vol. 275. Springer. pp. 107–114. arXiv: 1509.09090 . doi:10.1007/978-3-319-05951-8_11. ISBN   978-3-319-05950-1. ISSN   2194-5357. S2CID   15361632.
  3. Wolk, Krzysztof; Marasek, Krzysztof (2015). "Tuned and GPU-accelerated parallel data mining from comparable corpora". In Král, Pavel; Matousek, Václav (eds.). Text, Speech, and Dialogue – 18th International Conference, TSD 2015, Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 14–17, 2015, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 9302. Springer. pp. 32–40. arXiv: 1509.08639 . doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24033-6_4.