Labels: automation Adam Kilgarriff

Auckland 2012Kilgarriff / Labels: automation2 Which words are:  Most distinctive of business English?  Most often in plural? For eg English nouns  Most often used in gerund? For eg Spanish verbs

Auckland 2012Kilgarriff / Labels: automation3 Common issue for lexicographers  Ordinary cases No need to say anything in dictionary  Extreme cases (“most X”) Needs saying

Auckland 2012Kilgarriff / Labels: automation4 Not hard in principle  Given the right corpus For each word  Count, under condition 1 Eg plural instances  Count, under condition 2 Eg all instances  Compute ratio Sort all words according to ratio Words at top of list are most X

Auckland 2012Kilgarriff / Labels: automation5 In practice  Programming task  Big corpora: big and slow  Slightly different each time  Very rarely done (except Keywords in WordSmith)  Now: automated in Sketch Engine demo

Auckland 2012Kilgarriff / Labels: automation6 FindX specification file: type 1 =plural name Q1 [lempos="%s" & tag="NN2"] Q2 [lempos="%s" & tag="NN[10]"] The two queries to compare frequencies for lempos="%s" means the list we want is a list of lempos (lemma + pos) RE ^[a-z]+-n$ items matching this RegExp only (here: all-lower-case nouns)

Auckland 2012Kilgarriff / Labels: automation7 FindX specification file: type 2 =passive name HR passives human-readable name (optional) WS passive use the word sketch relation ‘passive’ RE -v$ only for items matching this RegExp (here: only verbs) (optional)