Corpus Annotation

In the past few decades the use of increasingly large text corpora has grown rapidly in language and linguistics research. This was enabled by remarkable strides in natural language processing (NLP) technology, technology that enables computers to automatically and efficiently process, annotate and analyze large amounts of spoken and written text in linguistically and/or pragmatically meaningful ways. It has become more desirable than ever before for language and linguistics researchers who use corpora in their research to gain an adequate understanding of the relevant NLP technology to take full advantage of its capabilities. This volume provides language and linguistics researchers with an accessible introduction to the state-of-the-art NLP technology that facilitates automatic annotation and analysis of large text corpora at both shallow and deep linguistic levels. The book covers a wide range of computational tools for lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analysis, together with detailed instructions on how to obtain, install and use each tool in different operating systems and platforms. The book illustrates how NLP technology has been applied in recent corpus-based language studies and suggests effective ways to better integrate such technology in future corpus linguistics research. This book provides language and linguistics researchers with a valuable reference for corpus annotation and analysis.

Corpus Annotation gives an up-to-date picture of this fascinating new area of research, and will provide essential reading for newcomers to the field as well as those already involved in corpus annotation. Early chapters introduce the different levels and techniques of corpus annotation. Later chapters deal with software developments, applications, and the development of standards for the evaluation of corpus annotation. While the book takes detailed account of research world-wide, its focus is particularly on the work of the UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) team at Lancaster University, which has been at the forefront of developments in the field of corpus annotation since its beginnings in the 1970s.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-315) and index.

This book addresses the research, analysis, and description of the methods and processes that are used in the annotation and processing of language corpora in advanced, semi-advanced, and non-advanced languages. It provides the background information and empirical data needed to understand the nature and depth of problems related to corpus annotation and text processing and shows readers how the linguistic elements found in texts are analyzed and applied to develop language technology systems and devices. As such, it offers valuable insights for researchers, educators, and students of linguistics and language technology.

Linguistically annotated corpora are becoming a central part of the corpus linguistics field. One of their main strengths is the level of searchability they offer, but with the annotation come problems of the initial complexity of queries and query tools. This book gives a full, pedagogic account of this burgeoning field. Beginning with an overview of corpus linguistics, its prerequisites and goals, the book then introduces linguistically annotated corpora. It explores the different levels of linguistic annotation, including morphological, parts of speech, syntactic, semantic and discourse-level, as well as advantages and challenges for such annotations. It covers the main annotated corpora for English, the Penn Treebank, the International Corpus of English, and OntoNotes, as well as a wide range of corpora for other languages. In its third part, search strategies required for different types of data are explored. All chapters are accompanied by exercises and by sections on further reading.

In recent years, journalistic practices have undergone a radical change due to the increasing pressure of new digital media on the professional practice. The ever-growing development of new technologies and the ceaseless fluctuation of social practices have challenged some of the traditional genres found in these professional contexts. On the basis of these premises, this book investigates a particular genre found in the context of TV newscasts. The genre under investigation is that of news tickers (or crawlers), that is, the graphic elements that scroll at the bottom of the screen during newscasts. The book introduces readers to this under-researched genre through a year-long collection of the news tickers displayed on BBC World News. Thanks to a corpus-based genre analysis, the generic status of news tickers is better defined by highlighting the presence of given strategies of marketization. Additionally, this volume investigates if news tickers can be seen as a mixed (sub-)genre that interdiscursively combines traditional linguistic elements of headlines and lead paragraphs to achieve, from a (Critical) Genre Analysis point of view, a specific private intention in the context of the BBC.

This is a text which surveys the growing field of research known as corpus annotation - an electronic collection of texts. Corpus annotation is a central resource in linguisticsi̧nformation technology and the processing of human language. The book seeks to show the nature of language and the most effective means of analysing it. A bibliography lists relevant e-mail addresses and Web sites.