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

Constructing comparable corpora – Newspaper texts

• Newspaper corpora
• Relatively easy to acquire
• A wide variety of fields
• Similarity in
• tenor
• mode

Using comparable corpora – Newspaper texts

Concurrent corpora > extraction of similar news items > e.g.

• War reports
• Politics – election campaigns
• Football during the World Cup

OR > styles of journalism > comparing individual journalists etc.

Constructing comparable corpora – general language + restricted text type

• General subject texts of similar text type – e.g. Encyclopedia entries, tourism pamphlets
• Literary texts of similar period, school or genre
• Technical and scientific texts with similar form or function e.g. textbooks

Using comparable corpora – general language + restricted text type

• Discourse analysis
• Pragmatics
• Genre analysis
• Sociolinguistic analysis

Constructing comparable corpora – specialized language

• Special domains at various levels – e.g.
• Geography > population geography > ethnic minorities
• Engineering > mechanical engineering > tribology
• Medicine > oncology > breast cancer

Using comparable corpora – specialized language

• Genre analysis
• Terminology extraction
• Information retrieval
• Web browsing technology
• Knowledge engineering

All corpora construction

• Must establish:
• Overall general policy in relation to:
• Form – computational structure
• Content of sub-corpora
• Availability to general / restricted public
• Specific objectives of sub-corpora

All corpora construction

• Must take into account:
• Copyright restrictions
• Effect of external factors on the text
• Idiosyncracies of individual author
• Characteristics of writing in specific cultural/ social situation
• Homogenising effect of internationalisation
• Eurospeak
• Anglicisation of scientific terminology