1. Topics in Linguistics ENG 331
Rania Al-Sabbagh
Department of English
Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages)
Ain Shams University
Week 5

2. Offline Corpus Processors
Offline corpus processors are software programs that you download, install, and use on your local machine. They do not usually come with corpora. Instead, you upload you own corpus on them.
Pros and Cons:
Pros:
You work on your own corpus.
There is no need to be connected to the internet.
There are many offline corpus processors that you can choose from.
Cons:
They are not always free.
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3. AntConc: An Overview
AntConc is one offline corpus processor that is available for free. It comes with multiple functions including:
Wordlists
Concordancers
Keyword recognition
Collocations
Data visualization
Furthermore, it supports regular expressions.
AntConc is one processors among many others made available by Laurence Anthony.
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4. AntConc: Getting Started
The download page is available from here.
For windows, just double click the executable file and the software will start
AntConc accepts three types of files:
Text files
HTML files
XML files
For illustration purposes, we will use the US constitution text file.
To upload your file(s), File > Open File(s) or File > Open Dir
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5. AntConc: Wordlist 1
The first thing you would like to know about your corpus is how many words it has.
Through the Wordlist function you can count:
Tokens: the total number of words including duplicates.
Types (aka vocabulary size): the total number of words without duplicates.
Lexical richness = Token/Type ratio = Tokens ÷ Types
The Wordlist function from AntConc offers you: (1) the total number of tokens, (2) the total number of types, and (3) the raw frequency of every word.
The Wordlist can be sorted by frequency or alphabetically.
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6. AntConc: Wordlist 2
As we can see in the Wordlist, function words are typically the most frequent.
How can we exclude these words from the Wordlist?
In CL, these words are referred to as the stop words. You can make a list of them and upload it to the concordancer to avoid showing these words to you.
To add your list of stop words, Tool Preferences > Wordlist > Use a stoplist below
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7. Quiz How many words (tokens) are in the US constitution?
What is the vocabulary size of the US constitution?
What is the raw frequency of each of the following words?
president
legislature
congress
What is the normalized frequency of each of the words from the previous question?
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8. AntConc: Concordance
The concordance function allows you to see your query in content.
You can select the window size that you want to see around your query.
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9. AntConc: Concordance Plot
The concordance plot is a visualization function. It allows you to see the distribution of your query in the different parts of the file.
The plot of ‘president’ is as follows:
It means that the query is the most frequent towards the end of the file. You can click at any given line to see the actual paragraphs in which the query is used.
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10. AntConc: Collocates
AntConc comes with a ‘collocates’ function to find out collocations.
Similar to COCA, AntConc allows you to set the window size to find out adjacent and non-adjacent collocations.
Furthermore, AntConc has the threshold option so that only words that meet the set threshold are considered.
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11. Quiz What are the most frequency collocations with ‘president’ in:
immediate following context
immediate preceding context
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12. AntConc: Keyword One last function in AntConc is the keyword list.
In CL, a word is considered a keyword whose normalized frequency is exceptionally high in comparison with a reference corpus.
The reference corpus is typically a very large, general corpus like these.
To upload your reference corpus, Tool Preferences > Keyword > Use raw files OR Tool Preferences > Keyword > Use word lists
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