Corpus Linguistics

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Corpus Linguistics

• Developing a
• PolyU Language Bank
• Sherman Lee
• egslee_at_inet.polyu.edu.hk
• PI Grahame Bilbow
• Thanks to Chris Greaves, Raymond Cheung, Li Lan

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Outline

• Background
• Goals of corpus linguistics
• Types of corpora
• Applications of corpus analysis
• As an illustration
• Exploring units of meaning
• Case study
• Developing a PolyU Language Bank
• Aims and objectives of project
• Similar existing projects
• Procedures
• The PolyU Language Bank
• Current status
• Sample corpora
• Sample search

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Goals of corpus linguistics

• Chomskyan linguistics
• Langue (competence)
• Ideal speaker/hearer
• Language innate mental faculty
• Intuitive evidence
• Universals
• Grammar

• Corpus linguistics
• Parole (performance)
• Complexity/variation
• Language social phenomenon
• Empirical evidence
• Differences
• Meaning

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Basic tools

• Corpus a systematic collection of speech or
  writing that is built according to explicit
  design criteria for a specific purpose
• c.f. EAGLES broad definition A corpus can
  potentially contain any text type, incl. word
  lists, dictionaries, etc.
• Concordancer search engine (e.g. WordSmith
  SARA)
• Concordance occurrences of search item,
  displayed in list with immediate context shown

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Types of corpora

• Written vs Spoken
• General vs Specialised
• e.g. ESP, Learner corpora
• Monolingual vs Multilingual
• e.g. Parallel, Comparable
• Synchronic vs Diachronic Monitor
• Annotated vs Unannotated

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Written corpora
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Specialised corpora
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Other examples of available corpora
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Some applications of corpus analysis

• Language teaching learning
• Empirical teaching data authentic examples of
  language use
• Reference source answering learners questions
  or explaining learner errors
• Whats the difference between at last and in
  the end?
• How is hardly used?
• Preparation of teaching materials e.g.
  vocabulary lists, CLOZE tests
• CALL concordancing and data-driven learning
• Translation
• Using parallel texts to find suitable translation
  equivalents
• Creation of translation databases or glossaries
  for domain-specific terminology, e.g. business,
  law, science
• Exploring units of meaning in texts
• Linguistics and language research
• Lexicography lexical studies e.g. relative
  word frequency
• Language variation e.g. linguistic features
  across registers
• Grammar corpora used as data to test
  hypotheses, syntactic theory
• Pragmatics discourse e.g. CA of discourse
  features in spoken (conversational) data

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Exploring meaning, units of meaning

• Focus on meaning because
• People interested in the meanings of texts, in
  how language is actually used in discourse
• Meaning is a key problem for translation,
  language learning, information management
• What are basic units of meaning?
• Language teaching (TEFL) vocabulary often
  introduced in the form of new single words
• Words considered to be basic units of meaning
• Is the word an ideal unit of meaning?
• If you dog a dog during the dog days of
  summer, youll be a dog tired dog catcher
• Can I sit down? My dogs are barking
• Most lexical errors made by language learners
  result from failure to deal with ambiguities of
  single words

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Unambiguous Units of Meaning

• Notion of an Unambiguous Unit of Meaning
  necessary for understanding meaning
• UUoM keyword and all words in the context that
  contribute to making the word unambiguous
• Compounds, idioms, multi-word units,
  collocations, set phrases
• Often determined by a syntactic pattern
• Adj N
• friendly fire, closing remarks
• V N
• invite proposals, draw conclusions
• Adv A
• politically correct, environmentally friendly
• N of N
• cause of death, proof of identity, code of
  practice, duty of care

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Case study

• Search for units of meaning in online
  dictionaries and corpora
• friendly fire
• environmentally friendly
• Corpora from 1990s
• British National Corpus (BNC)
• 100,000,000 words
• Written (90)
• Extracts from regional/national newspapers,
  specialist periodicals, academic books, popular
  fiction, un/published letters, memos,
  school/university essays
• Spoken (10)
• Informal conversation, formal meetings (business,
  government), radio shows, phone-ins
• The Times (1995, Jan March)
• 10,220,367 words
• Written business, home news, readers letters,
  reviews
• Corpora from 1960 - 1970s
• Brown corpus / LOB corpus
• Each 1 million words
• Written, balanced corpora of 15 genres of text

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Search results
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What the results show

• friendly fire, environmentally friendly
• Represent fairly new concepts
• Occur in the newer corpora (1990s) as units of
  meaning
• Occur as entries in some of the online
  dictionaries only (not bilingual dictionaries)
• New terminology and terms of common usage not
  always recorded in dictionaries and termbanks
• One way of using corpora for learning and
  translation
• Use corpus evidence to help students recognise
  units of meaning introduce notion of units of
  meaning into language learning

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Aims of PULB project

• To design and build an archive of language
  corpora language bank
• To be used by staff and students in the
  department
• For teaching, language learning and research
  purposes
• To provide a user-friendly platform
• A WWW interface via which users can freely access
  the language bank
• With browse, search and concordance facilities

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Ingredients of PULB

• Sources standard corpora, departmental
  collections
• Medium written texts, transcribed spoken data
• Language types native speaker, learner corpora
• Languages English, Chinese, Japanese, French,
  German
• Genres business, law, academia, media, social,
  literature
• Target Size 30 millionwords (European) /
  characters (Asian)

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Why a language bank? - Whats in it for us

• Free and simple shared access to a collection of
  language corpora
• That you can utilise for your teaching
• Authentic examples of language use at your
  fingertips
• Empirical teaching data covering different
  specialisms (ESP, EAP)
• That you can utilise for your research
• A ready-made collection of data waiting for you
  to work on
• Saving on time and resources
• Way of incorporating new methods and information
  technology into the departments teaching and
  research activities
• Increase students awareness of this rapidly
  developing methodology / branch of language
  studies (corpus linguistics, corpora studies)
• Way of integrating theory with technology in the
  classroom
• Train students to be more computer-literate
• All of the above can
• Motivate students to become active learners
• Help students to more effectively learn the
  target language (cf goals of DDL)

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Similar existing projects

• W3 Corpora Project (Essex)
• http//clwww.essex.ac.uk/w3c/
• Access to corpora (Gutenberg texts, LOB,
  LOB-tagged)
• Web interface for performing searches
• Online tutorial and info on corpus linguistics
• Web Concordancer (VLC, PolyU)
• http//vlc.polyu.edu.hk/concordance/
• Access to variety of corpora and texts
  (bilingual/parallel corpora, news, Bible, works
  of fiction)
• Web interface for performing searches

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Directions for PULB

• Build a language bank with features that parallel
  those of similar sites
• VLC
• Bring together corpora and texts of various types
  and genres, of different languages
• Essex
• Make available different facilities for different
  categories of users (cf. legal considerations)
• Provide on-site tutorial, corpora-based info
• Include extra features
• Allow searches in multiple texts / corpora
  simultaneously
• Some form of parallel concordancing

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Target composition of PULB
French
German
Business Chinese
Business Japanese
PolyU Language Bank
Chinese
Japanese
Legal Chinese
Japanese Literature
English
General corpora
Learner corpora
Spoken Corpora
Specialised corpora
ICE
BNC
BROWN
Student work
Teaching reflections
Business writing
Social interactions
Business English (PUBC)
Legal English
Academic English
Workplace English
HK spoken corpus
Conference speeches
Academic presentations
English Literature
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Procedures (i)

• Collate, sort, categorise data from various
  sources
• Commercially available data
• Departmental collections, incl.
• PolyU Business Corpus (Li and Bilbow)
• Bilingual corpora (Xu)
• ESP / EAP corpora (Forey)
• Learner corpora (Sengupta)

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Procedures (ii)

• For the departmental collections
• Decide how to present each collection
• E.g. Sub-categories, macro categories
• Clean up texts
• E.g. Duplications of text samples
• E.g. Structural features (headings, typographic
  features)
• E.g. Personal information found in data
• To protect anonymity or privacy of authors and
  speakers
• Annotate texts
• Provide descriptive information about each corpus
• Compiler, time of compilation, type of
  collection
• Provide descriptive information about the texts
• Number, size, genre of subtexts
• Bibliographic info (written text)
• Ethnographic info (spoken data)
• Provide structural information for texts if
  necessary
• Mark texts for paragraph boundaries etc

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Procedures (iii)

• Put corpora together on platform set up search
  and support facilities
• PULB map
• Browse facility
• Search and concordance facilities
• Tutorial / general information
• Transplant PULB onto dept website for use by
  staff and students
• Promote PULB among corpora community
• Data provider to data archives / distribution
  sites, e.g. OLAC ICAME

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The PolyU Language Bank

• Current status
• Range of corpora totalling 12M words
• Individual corpus descriptions
• Index of corpora
• Simple to use built-in concordancer
• Available at http//langbank.engl.polyu.edu.hk/

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The PolyU Language Bank

• Some of the currently available corpora
• PolyU Business Corpus (Eng, Chi, Jap)
• BNC Sampler Corpus (Spoken, Written)
• Corpus of Multilingual Texts
• Corpus of Nursing and Health Science Texts
• Learner Corpus of Essays and Reports
• HK Bilingual Corpus of Legal and Documentary
  Texts
• ...

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How you can contribute

• Talk to us about your ideas
• What would you like to see being incorporated
  into PULB?
• In terms of corpora
• In terms of search facilities and supplementary
  information
• Can you think of other ways in which PULB can be
  organised and structured?
• How likely are you to make use of PULB in your
  teaching and research?
• Do you have any suggestions for corpus studies
  based on available or potentially available
  corpora from PULB?
• Do you know of similar projects being undertaken
  elsewhere that we can learn from?
• Talk to us about your collections / corpora
• Do you have collections of language data from
  past research projects that are (could be)
  presented as a corpus (corpora)?
• Can we help you put your collections to good use?
• Can we work together to incorporate your
  collections into PULB?

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Concluding remarks

• Corpora represent a valuable but under exploited
  resource for teaching and research
• PULB aims to bring together various corpora under
  a single departmental archive, accessible via WWW
• You can help us by contributing your ideas and/or
  your language collections
• Please visit and test the PULB website at
  http//langbank.engl.polyu.edu.hk/ and provide us
  with feedback using the online evaluation form
• Thank you very much

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Social grooming
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CLOZE
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PolyU Business Corpus

• Compiled in 1999-2000 (Li Bilbow)
• Multilingual - comparable corpora
• English (c. 1.3 M words)
• Chinese (c. 1.2 M words)
• Japanese (c. 1.1 M words)
• Business texts from newspapers, government
  reports, company reports and brochures
• Has been used for creating a bilingual
  English-Chinese business lexicon

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PolyU Business Lexicon
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Duplication
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