Corpus compilation and design

Recent studies have shown how cycles of illumination provide a "reading" or interpretation of the text; the present piece sets forth the hypothesis that the planner of Ars. 5218 (probably Pieratt dou Tielt) "read" the Queste del saint Graal in the context of church history and in the light of topics of current ecclesiastical debate.

El  principal objetivo del presente trabajo será proporcionar al traductor una herramienta que le ayude a cubrir sus necesidades terminológicas cuando tenga que hacer frente a una traducción técnica, en particular, de fichas técnicas de impresoras 3D. Para ello, pretendemos crear un glosario (inglés-español), basado en un corpus virtual diseñado para tal fin, que contenga la fraseología y, más concretamente, las colocaciones y locuciones nominales presentes en las fichas técnicas de impresoras 3D. Así, en primer lugar, ilustraremos una metodología de creación de corpus bilingüe y virtual de fichas técnicas de impresoras 3D, al que denominaremos 3DCOR, para el que aseguraremos su representatividad tanto cualitativa como cuantitativa; seguidamente mostraremos el proceso de etiquetado de 3DCOR gracias al programa TagAnt. A través del etiquetado, podremos analizar en profundidad los diferentes tipos de colocaciones y de locuciones y su frecuencia en este género y temática. Finalmente, y con ayuda del programa AntConc, se identificarán los equivalentes inglés-español de las colocaciones y locuciones más frecuentes en el corpus 3DCOR.

The main objective of this paper will be to provide the translator with a tool that will help him/her to cover his/her terminology needs when dealing with a technical translation, in particular, 3D printer datasheets. To this end, we intend to create a glossary (English-Spanish), based on a virtual corpus designed for this purpose, which will contain the phraseology and, more specifically, nominal collocations and locutions present in the 3D printer datasheets. Thus, firstly, we will illustrate a methodology to create a virtual and bilingual corpus based on 3D printer datasheets. This corpus will receive the name of 3DCOR and will be representative in terms of quality and quantity. After, we will present the process of tagging a corpus using the software TagAnt. To conclude, we will analyse the different collocations and locutions and their frequency used in this textual genre and subject. Finally, with the AntConc Program, we will identify the equivalents in English and Spanish of the most frequent collocations in the 3DCOR corpus.

This paper proposes an accessible measure of the relevance of additional terms to a given query, describes and comments on the steps leading to its development, and discusses its utility. The measure, termed relative query term relevance (RQTR), draws on techniques used in information retrieval, and can be combined with a technique used in creating corpora from the world wide web, namely keyword analysis. It is independent of reference corpora, and does not require knowledge of the number of (relevant) documents in the database. Although it does not make use of user/expert judgements of document relevance, it does allow for subjective decisions. However, subjective decisions are triangulated against two objective indicators: keyness and, mainly, RQTR.

Este estudio investiga la producción a través del role-play de tres actos de habla en español por parte de tres grupos diferentes de hablantes: nativos de español, nativos de inglés con un nivel avanzado de español, y nativos de inglés con un nivel intermedio de español. Se han tenido en cuenta variables como el nivel de los estudiantes, su experiencia en el extranjero, cuántos años llevaban estudiando la lengua o su propia autopercepción del nivel que tienen. Las transcripciones de los 108 vídeos grabados se han clasificado de acuerdo con los tres actos de habla, los tres grupos, y las estrategias de acción y reacción de cada acto de habla que habían establecido investigaciones anteriores.
Los resultados muestran que los grupos difieren entre sí tanto en la interpretación de cada uno de estos actos de habla como en las estrategias utilizadas para producirlos y reaccionar a ellos, tanto verbal como gestualmente, demostrando así que la competencia pragmática no se ha adquirido al mismo nivel que la competencia gramatical en los estudiantes del grupo avanzado. Se ha podido observar, pues, transferencia negativa tanto en las estrategias utilizadas, como en la extensión y el número de los turnos producidos en los grupos de hablantes no nativos.
Como producto final, además de esta tesis, se ha creado un corpus multimodal al cual tanto investigadores como profesores y alumnos podrán acceder fácilmente a través de internet para poder trabajar con los vídeos y sus transcripciones, las cuales pueden ser descargadas fácilmente.

Palabras clave: corpus, corpus multimodal, pragmática, actos de habla, competencia pragmática, lenguaje no verbal, ELE, adquisición de segundas lenguas, adquisición de lenguas extranjeras, SLA, FLA, FTA, actos amenazantes para la imagen, pragmática intercultural, pragmática sociocognitiva, sociolingüística, rechazo, cumplido, disculpa.

The objective of this article is to present a pragmatic model for text classification that can represent the different communicative situations, and consequently, the different levels of text specialization. The main purpose of the model is to serve as a useful tool to recover and select initially the written texts that will form part of a special-purpose corpus. With this objective in mind, in the first part of this article, I will revise briefly the concepts and criteria that theoretically frame this work. In the second part, I will provide the criteria and methods adopted to conceive the model, which will be developed in a sequential manner. This second part will conclude with an integral graphical view of the model. Finally, in the conclusion, I will supply some comments about the model.

This study aims at analysing the differences between two lexicological databases for English language, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Taking as a starting point the lexemes LEARN and TRAVEL, we study the differences between 'traveling' vs 'travelling' and 'learned' vs 'learnt' in COCA and the BNC, i.e. in American and British English, respectively. We also explore the functions and possibilities each corpus has, taking always into consideration the differences and similarities they present between them. Likewise, we try to explain why there are differences in the results between both databases, and how we can make the most of both of them. Our findings show that the best would be to know beforehand the characteristics that each corpus has, since each corpus contains different texts with a different English variety, covers different periods, and contains as well a different number of words. To put it in a nutshell, we conclude that both corpora complement each other, and depending on the goal of our research, we may want to use one or another, or even both of them.

(ES)
Este estudio tiene por finalidad analizar las diferencias entre dos corpus lexicológicos de la lengua inglesa, el Corpus de Inglés Americano Contemporáneo (COCA) y el Corpus Nacional Británico (BNC). Tras tomar como punto de partida los lexemas LEARN y TRAVEL, estudiamos las diferencias entre 'traveling' vs. 'travelling' y 'learned' vs. 'learnt' en el COCA y el BNC, es decir, en inglés americano y británico, respectivamente. Asimismo, exploramos las funciones y posibilidades que tiene cada corpus, sin dejar de tener en cuenta en ningún momento las diferencias y similitudes que presentan entre ellos. También tratamos de explicar las causas de las diferencias de los resultados entre ambas bases de datos, y cómo podemos sacar el máximo provecho de ambas. Nuestras conclusiones muestran que lo mejor sería conocer de antemano las características que tiene cada corpus, puesto que cada corpus contiene diferentes textos con una variedad de la lengua inglesa diferente, cubre diferentes períodos, y contiene también un número diferente de palabras. Finalmente, concluimos que ambos corpus se complementan entre sí y que, dependiendo del objetivo de nuestra investigación, podemos querer usar uno u otro, o incluso ambos.

This paper describes the compilation of a social media corpus with Facebook posts and WhatsApp chats. Authentic messages were voluntarily donated by Dutch youths between 12 and 23 years old. Social media nowadays constitute a fundamental part of youths' private lives, constantly connecting them to friends and family via computer-mediated communication (CMC). The social networking site Facebook and mobile phone chat application WhatsApp are currently quite popular in the Netherlands. Several relevant issues concerning corpus compilation are discussed, including website creation, promotion, metadata collection, and intellectual property rights/ethical approval. The application that was created for scraping Facebook posts from users' timelines, of course with their consent, can serve as an example for future data collection. The Facebook and WhatsApp messages are collected for a sociolinguistic study into Dutch youths' written CMC, of which a preliminary analysis is presented, but also present a valuable data source for further research.

This LIA International Conference and Cultural Events 2015 proceeding elaborates how a freeware concordancer named  AntConc facilitates teaching and learning of grammar to 21st century learners and it suggests some activities to encourage students' self-discovery and induction of grammar structure

The aim of this paper is first to present some theoretical guidelines on the design and compilation of a specialized corpus in compliance with Corpus Linguistics standards; second, to provide a comprehensive description of the stages followed in the creation of the Telecommunication Engineering Corpus and its characteristics; and finally, to report the immediate results obtained from the basic analysis of the corpus: statistical information and frequency list.
This paper is particularly addressed to those ESP practitioners who have to face with the compilation of a specialized corpus for the first time, without a working knowledge of the specific subject domain they are involved in.

While demands for corpora from media which mix visual and linguistic elements have increased in recent years with developments in corpus-based linguistics research, the actual creation and design of such corpora present many unique problems. Most centrally, there remains much to be considered in terms of how to isolate and meaningfully represent their linguistic data. In line with these trends, in this paper I introduce a 687,654 character (55,415 entries) corpus of the language from Japanese comics (manga). Many of the issues encountered in its design are found with other media – newspaper stories, advertisements, political cartoons – which mix the visual with the linguistic. In addition to describing how such unusual text could be of interest to other researchers, the approaches taken here may help others with similar projects.

This chapter aims at showing that: 1) a coding system such as the schwa coding in the Phonologie du Français Contemporain project can be a useful procedure to exploit an L2 phonological corpus for research-oriented purposes; 2) such a coding procedure can turn an L2 database into a rated L2 database which can be used in the field of applied L2 speech sciences; 3) such an L2 coding issue highlights the socio- and psycho-linguistic links between L2 speech assessment and speech models. First, we remind the reader that transcription of oral data is a crucial stage in corpus processing, since it can affect the results of subsequent analyses. Then we illustrate data coding in L1 with examples from the PFC project. The transposition of such a coding system to L2 French phonology sheds some light on the evaluation process at stake in L2 production coding activity. This points to the complexity of defining L2 speech models. The impact of L2 speech characteristics on speech recognition systems and the importance of corpus assessment for such systems is highlighted. Finally, we illustrate the coding-rating activity and its methodological challenges with the French nasal vowels system in the Interphonologie du Français Contemporain framework.

This paper presents the current status of the proje ct Reference Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose, which pursues the digital editing of hitherto unedited scientific, particularly medical, manuscri pts in late Middle English, as well as the compilation f an annotated corpus. The principles followed for th e digital editions and the compilation of the corpus will be explained; the development and application of several specific tools to retrieve linguistic information within the framework of the project wil l also be discussed. Our work joins in with worldwide initiatives from other research teams devoted to th e study of medical and scientific writings in the his tory of English (see Taavitsainen, 2009).

From the editors' introduction:
"The Late Modern English period is taken care of, as it were, by Stefan Dollinger and his article on problems involved in the compilation of a historical corpus. Based on his experience in transcribing early Canadian manuscripts for his Corpus of Early Ontario English, Stefan Dollinger discusses some of the challenges in connection with transcribing Late Modern English handwriting for machine-readable corpora. As a particular test case he focuses on the discrimination of upper and lower case letters, which is shown to depend on a variety of different factors."

The tools of corpus linguistics have become indispensable for research in descriptive translation studies (DTS), which aims to describe the characteristics of the translation process, and translational texts. Machine-readable corpora of translated texts are crucially important since they can yield statistically significant results that underpin the findings of empirical studies. Baker's (1993) seminal paper gave new impetus to translation research, as it has re-calibrated the goals of DTS to study and uncover the particular properties of the so-called " third code " (Frawley 1984), i.e. the language of translated texts, with the help of computerized corpora. The present study, after providing a brief overview of international and Hungarian corpus linguistic research, introduces the Pannonia Corpus Project developed by Eötvös Loránd University's Translation Studies Doctoral Programme, which was created to make a Hungarian translation corpus, containing millions of w...

Dada la carencia de recursos terminológicos para la traducción en el ámbito técnico, se presenta una metodología de explotación de corpus para la traducción inversa (español-inglés) que se aplica a las fichas técnicas de impresoras 3D. Esta metodología está integrada por tres pasos: de un lado, la aplicación de unos criterios claros de diseño, así como de un protocolo de compilación, que sirven para garantizar la representatividad cualitativa; y, de otro lado, el análisis de la muestra con ReCor, para garantizar la representatividad cuantitativa. El resultado obtenido ha sido un corpus paralelo representativo, fiable y de calidad denominado 3DCOR. Este corpus se ha gestionado y explotado mediante el uso del programa ParaConc para llevar a cabo la traducción al inglés de una ficha técnica de la impresora Lion 2 de la empresa española Lion3D. El corpus ha servido como único recurso para resolver problemas conceptuales, ortotipográficios, terminológicos y fraseológicos para proponer una traducción final.

Résumé (fra)

Les méthodes de traitement automatique de corpus se sont jusqu’à présent plus intéressées aux corpus multilingues (textes de différentes langues portant sur un même thème) qu’aux corpus plurilingues (corpus présentant une pluralité linguistique interne). Ceci est dû au fait qu’elles ont surtout émergé dans le domaine du traitement automatique des langues, dans des applications pratiques portant sur des textes écrits, et non dans le domaine de la linguistique, qui s’intéresse aux manifestations spontanées et non-normées, où des phénomènes d’utilisation combinée de plusieurs langues sont fréquents.

L’observation, et la compréhension, de phénomènes de contact de langues, suscite pourtant un intérêt accru non seulement de la part des spécialistes de linguistique, mais également de la part de tous ceux qui s’intéressent aux corpus d’oral ou de genres textuels non-normés.

Dans le cadre du projet ANR CLAPOTY, une équipe de linguistes et d’informaticiens s’est intéressée à la représentation et à l’encodage de transcriptions d’oral présentant différentes situations de contact de langues, mettant au total en contact 40 langues de différentes aires et de profils typologiques variés.

Le choix effectué, pour rendre l’exploitation de ces corpus possible sans perdre la complexité des phénomènes réels, a été d’annoter avec précision toutes les données linguistiques des unités observées, sans les classer a priori dans des catégories descriptives dont la définition fait souvent encore débat (comme emprunt, calque, ou alternance de code).

À cette fin, l’équipe de CLAPOTY a développé un schéma d’annotation conforme aux normes les plus actuelles en matière de transcription (Unicode), et d’encodage des annotations (XML). Ce schéma s’inscrit dans le cadre de l’initiative TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), dont il constitue une extension. Dans ce modèle, les unités linguistiques, à tous les niveaux, peuvent être décrites comme relevant d’une langue ou d’une autre, voire de plusieurs à la fois. Ce modèle permet de rendre compte de la richesse et de la flexibilité des manifestations linguistiques spontanées, où il arrive que les pratiques langagières des locuteurs « flottent » entre deux langues.

Abstract (eng)

Methods in corpus processing have until recently been more focused on multilingual corpora (texts in different languages about the same domain) than on plurilingual corpora (corpora with an internal linguistic heterogeneity). This may be due to the fact that they have emerged in natural language processing contexts, mostly in practical applications to written texts, and not in the field of applied linguistics, where the focus is rather on spontaneous, genuine utterances of non-standard speech, and where phenomena of combined use of different languages are not rare.

However, observing -and understanding- language contact phenomena has a growing appeal not only to linguistic specialists, but also to all those who have an interest in mining corpora of spoken language, or non-standard written language.

Within the frame of the ANR CLAPOTY project, a team of linguists and computer scientists has worked on the representation and encoding of oral transcripts, displaying different situations of language contact (with a total of 40 languages from different linguistic areas and various typological profiles).

The choice that was made, in order to allow automatic mining of the corpora without losing the complexity of real-world linguistic phenomena, was to precisely annotate all the linguistic data on the observed units, without classifying them a priori in descriptive categories, the exact definition of which is still often debatable (e.g. borrowing, calque, code switching).

To this purpose, the CLAPOTY team has developed an annotation schema in compliance with the latest standards with respect to transcription (Unicode) and markup (XML). This schema follows the inspiration of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), extending it where needed (namely, for the annotation of language plurality). In this model, linguistic units (at all levels) may be described as pertaining to one language or another, and even to many languages at the same time. The model is able to represent the richness and versatility of spontaneous linguistic utterances, where speakers actually often “float” between two languages.

An important source of evidence for a terminologist comes from the different types of texts produced within a community of discourse or “epistemological community” (Alcaraz, 2000). Thus, the articles of specialised or professional journals, manuals, patents and so on, written by the ...

Historical corpora offer many potentialities for linguistic research. Thus, the present article provides an overview of the major English historical corpora compiled or being compiled both in Spain and abroad. They include different types such as tagged and parsed corpora, and their main features will be outlined. As for the organisation of the article, after the introductory section, the historical corpora created abroad will be presented. Then, those being constructed in Spain (Coruña, Las Palmas, Málaga, Salamanca, Santiago and Sevilla) will be discussed. Some final remarks and the references close the article.

Resumo O presente trabalho visa descrever a construção de corpus em uma área específica: a Teologia, de acordo com os postulados da Linguística de Corpus. Trata-se de um corpus piloto que não tem a pretensão de ser exaustivo, mas ser apenas uma amostragem da área em foco com o objetivo de exemplificar, de modo concreto, todas as etapas da metodologia usada na organização e compilação de corpora, que servirão à extração das Unidades Terminológicas e à elaboração de proposta de dicionário. A construção do corpus textual levou em consideração a sua representatividade, tanto na área específica quanto junto à comunidade alvo. Observe-se que, a representatividade aqui referida não está relacionada com a extensão, mas com a população envolvida e com a área temática. Abstract This paper aims to describe corpus construction in a specific area: Theology, according to Corpus Linguistics postulates. It is a pilot corpus, which does not claim to be exhaustive, but only be a sample of the focused area, which has as its objective to illustrate, in a concrete way, every step of the methodology used in the organization and compilation of corpora that will serve the Terminological Units extraction and the preparation of a dictionary proposal. The building of the textual corpus has taken into account its representativeness of the specific area as well as the target community. One should note that the representativeness referred to here is not related to the extension, but to the population involved and to the thematic area.

"In the Wake of the Compendia" presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.

This chapter presents a provably correct compilation scheme that converts a program into a network of abstract components that interact with each other by exchanging request and acknowledgement signals. We provide a systematic and modular
technique for correctly realizing the abstract components in
hardware device, and use a standard programming language to
describe both algorithms and circuits. The resulting circuitry, which behaves according to the program, has the same structure as the program. The circuit logic is asynchronous, with no global clock.

The design of an oral corpus and the processes of registering, codifying and treating the materials in order to build a useful resource for linguistic analysis prompt numerous decisions regarding theory and methodology. This article is focused on those stages of corpus construction which are more clearly conditioned by the computational processing necessary to make it functional. In order to adequately match the initial expectations and the real possibilities of using the tool, each feature we intend to codify must be measured against the workload and the means required to do so. Therefore, it is essential to take into account the available possibilities of processing and exploitation as they have a crucial impact on decisions regarding the corpus' construction. Based on experience acquired in the construction of the ESLORA corpus <http://eslora.usc.es/>, the article looks into some of the problems arising in the process of designing an oral corpus, such as the delicacy with which oral phenomena are represented, the segmentation of the discourse, the coexistence of different simultaneous tagging systems and the particularities of annotation in a bilingual or multilingual context.