Creating parallel and comparable corpora for work in domain specific areas of language

Similarity - Dialect?

• Dialect
• Geographical
• e.g. urban/rural areas, developed/developing countries
• Temporal
• e.g. historical periods, different age groups
• Social
• e.g. social classes, educational backgrounds

Comparability in Very Large Corpora

• Very Large Corpora comparable if :
• similar in size
• constructed according to same criteria –e.g. quantity and quality of text types
• Consider:
• British National Corpus
• Mannheimer Corpora

Comparability in newspaper corpora

• Newspaper corpora vary according to:
• Type: ‘quality’/‘popular’, general/specialised content
• Time: same day/month/year > ‘concurrent’ corpora
• Consider:
• CETEMPúblico - Portuguese
• Reuter’s Corpus - English

Comparability in literary corpora

• Period:
• Medieval, 18th Century, Post-war
• School:
• Romanticism, Realism, Post-modernism
• Genre:
• Novel, science fiction, drama, poetry

Comparability in technical and scientific corpora - form

• Pamphlets
• Manuals
• Textbooks
• Articles and papers
• Dissertations, theses

Comparability in technical and scientific corpora - content

• Everyday information
• Encyclopedic information
• Instructions
• Education
• Expert-to-expert communication

Constructing comparable corpora - general language

• Where does one start?
• Very large comparable corpora in 2 or more languages = mega-proposition!
• Carefully selected annotated general corpora – like ICAME corpora (Brown, LOB etc) = a possibility + limitations

Using comparable corpora - general language

• Advantages:
• Comparative and contrastive research at all levels
• Particularly useful for lexicographical research and search for syntactic patterns
• Disadvantages:
• Difficult to manage for more delicate analysis
• Unnecessary for certain types of research