Corpora, Language Technology and Maltese

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Corpora, Language Technology and Maltese

• Adam Kilgarriff
• Lexical Computing Ltd
• Lexicography MasterClass Ltd
• University of Sussex

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How do you find out about a language?

• Native speakers
• Dictionaries and Grammars
• Corpus

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Four ages of corpus research
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• Age 1
• Pre-computer
• James Murray,
• Chief Editor
• Oxford English
• Dictionary, vol 1
• 1879
• 20 million
• index cards

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Age 2 KWIC Concordances

• From 1980
• Computerised

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Age 2 KWIC Concordance
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Age 2 KWIC Concordances

• From 1980
• Computerised
• COBUILD project was innovator
• the coloured-pens method

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The coloured pens method
1 political association 4 person in an
agreement/dispute 2 social event
5 to be party to something... 3 group of
people
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• Age 2 limitations
• as corpora get bigger
• too much data
• 50 lines for a word read all
• 500 lines could read all, takes a long time
• 5000 lines no

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Age 3 Collocation statistics

• Problemtoo much data - how to summarise?
• Solutionlist of words occurring in
  neighbourhood of headword, with frequencies
• Sorted by salience

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Collocation listing
For right collocates of save (gt5 hits)
word freq word freq
forests 6 life 36
1.2 6 dollars 8
lives 37 costs 7
enormous 6 thousands 6
annually 7 face 9
jobs 20 estimated 6
money 64 your 7
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Age 4 The word sketch

• A corpus-derived one-page summary of a words
  grammatical and collocational behaviour

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Age 4 The word sketch

• Large well-balanced corpus
• Parse to find
• subjects, objects, heads, modifiers etc
• One list for each grammatical relation
• Statistics to sort each list

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Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced
Learners Ed Rundell, 2002
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• Developer Pavel Rychly, Brno
• Users
• OUP, Chambers, CUP
• Universities for teaching and research
• ELT textbook authors
• Demo
• http//www.sketchengine.co.uk/
• Self-registration for free account