1. Corpora, Language Technology and Maltese
Adam Kilgarriff
Lexical Computing Ltd
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd
University of Sussex

2. How do you find out about a language?
Native speakers
Dictionaries and Grammars
Corpus
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

3. Four ages of corpus research
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

4. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Age 1:
Pre-computer
James Murray,
Chief Editor
Oxford English
Dictionary, vol 1
1879:
20 million
index cards
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

5. Age 2: KWIC Concordances
From 1980
Computerised
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

6. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Age 2: KWIC Concordance
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

7. Age 2: KWIC Concordances
From 1980
Computerised
COBUILD project was innovator
the coloured-pens method
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

8. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
The coloured pens method
1 political association person in an agreement/dispute
2 social event to be party to something...
3 group of people
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

9. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Age 2: limitations
as corpora get bigger:
too much data
50 lines for a word: read all
500 lines: could read all, takes a long time
5000 lines: no
Pre-computer corpus lexicography, at its most systematic, used an index card for each citation. The citation was of a word, and tended to be of a rare word; for common words it does not seem worthwhile to take down citations.
For an account of the COBUILD project see Looking up, edited by John Sinclair (Collins, 1987). COBUILD was a collaboration between Birmingham University and Collins, and gave rise I n due course to the COBUILD English dictionary, for learners of English.
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

10. Age 3: Collocation statistics
Problem: too much data - how to summarise?
Solution: list of words occurring in neighbourhood of headword, with frequencies
Sorted by salience
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

11. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Collocation listing
For right collocates of save (>5 hits)
word
freq
forests 6
life 36
$1.2
dollars 8
lives 37
costs 7
enormous
thousands
annually
face 9
jobs 20
estimated
money 64
your
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

12. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Age 4: The word sketch
A corpus-derived one-page summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

13. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Age 4: The word sketch
Large well-balanced corpus
Parse to find
subjects, objects, heads, modifiers etc
One list for each grammatical relation
Statistics to sort each list
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

14. Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners
Ed: Rundell, 2002
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing

15. Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing
Developer: Pavel Rychly, Brno
Users:
OUP, Chambers, CUP
Universities for teaching and research
ELT textbook authors
Demo:
Self-registration for free account
Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing