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Corpus tools for parallel corpora of theatre plays: an introduction to TAligner and ACM-theatre

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Abstract

Software tools are of vital importance in corpus-based research, but they can also lead to restrictions on the type of supported corpora and the range of analyses that can be performed. For example, corpus analysis tools, as general purpose software, do not include specific features to process corpora of theatre plays. This situation is even worse for parallel corpora of theatrical texts, in that there is currently a lack of software that allows for both the alignment and analysis of parallel corpora here. In this contribution, we will first outline the peculiarities of theatre texts and suggest three software features to address them: annotation of the structural units of plays, alignment at the utterance level, and concordances and statistics using the annotated units. Second, we will present the specific functionalities of TAligner and ACM to build and analyse parallel corpora of play texts, showing how new avenues of research are opening up with the development of these tools.

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Code availability

Software application.

Notes

  1. Following Xiao and Yue (2004, p. 240), parallel corpora are understood as a set of source texts aligned with their translations. From the perspective of corpus tools, parallel corpora are more complex than monolingual or comparable ones, since issues such as alignment need to be considered (Sanjurjo-González, 2018, p. 25). Although the focus of this contribution is on parallel corpora, the adjustments of tools for structural annotation and specific analytical functions may also be useful for monolingual corpora.

  2. TAligner can be accessed at https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/42445.

  3. We might mention that, apart from theatre plays, film and TV scripts also belong to the dramatic field (Esslin, 1990, p. 31) and share these structural peculiarities. Therefore, the analysis of these text types could also benefit from the advances in analytical tools suggested here.

  4. Theatre-specific features are marked with asterisks.

  5. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespearelang/project-resources/data/.

  6. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespearelang/files/2019/08/ESC-First-Folio-Plus-Manual32483.pdf.

  7. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespearelang/files/2019/08/ESC-Comparative-Plays-Corpus-Manual32481.pdf.

  8. https://lexically.net/wordsmith/support/shakespeare.html.

  9. https://dracor.org/.

  10. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/esc-user-service/.

  11. https://ezlinavis.dracor.org/.

  12. Evert (2014) points out that “cwb-align isn't a particularly sophisticated sentence aligner, so it's likely to get some cases wrong”.

  13. Line breaks might be useful for alignment; however, utterances can have more than one paragraph. In addition, the use of line breaks in plays may be inconsistent. Moreover, features of AntPConc are far from those of the tool’s monolingual version. AntPConc can be considered as a simple parallel concordance.

  14. The application offers frequency lists, but so far they take texts as wholes (Sanz-Villar & Andaluz-Pinedo, 2021).

  15. ACTRES Corpus Manager pending register.

  16. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212303.

  17. A recently developed tool for custom annotation, OpenTagger (Sanjurjo-González & Andaluz-Pinedo, 2020), is planned to be integrated into ACM-theatre in the future.

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Acknowledgements

Research group TRALIMA/ITZULIK, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, GIU 16/48, Basque Government consolidated research group, IT1209-19. Research group ACTRES. Part of this study has been supported by the Spanish Agency for Research, Development and Innovation (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) [FFI2016-75672-R]. Red de Excelencia CorpusNet, funded by Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness project [FFI2016-81934-RED]. At the time of writing, the co-author Olaia Andaluz-Pinedo is a doctoral student funded by the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU [PIF]. We would like to thank the reviewers for their useful comments.

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  1. University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Leioa, Spain

    Olaia Andaluz-Pinedo

  2. University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain

    Hugo Sanjurjo-González

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  1. Olaia Andaluz-Pinedo
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Correspondence to Olaia Andaluz-Pinedo.

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Andaluz-Pinedo, O., Sanjurjo-González, H. Corpus tools for parallel corpora of theatre plays: an introduction to TAligner and ACM-theatre. Lang Resources & Evaluation 56, 651–671 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09585-5

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