Text corpus

In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and
structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are
used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules
within a specific language territory.

In search technology, a corpus is the collection of documents which is being searched.

Overview
A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpus) or text data in multiple languages
(multilingual corpus).

In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process
known as annotation. An example of annotating a corpus is part-of-speech tagging, or POS-tagging, in
which information about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in
the form of tags. Another example is indicating the lemma (base) form of each word. When the language of
the corpus is not a working language of the researchers who use it, interlinear glossing is used to make the
annotation bilingual.

Some corpora have further structured levels of analysis applied. In particular, smaller corpora may be fully
parsed. Such corpora are usually called Treebanks or Parsed Corpora. The difficulty of ensuring that the
entire corpus is completely and consistently annotated means that these corpora are usually smaller,
containing around one to three million words. Other levels of linguistic structured analysis are possible,
including annotations for morphology, semantics and pragmatics.

Applications
Corpora are the main knowledge base in corpus linguistics. Other notable areas of application include:

Language technology, natural language processing, computational linguistics

The analysis and processing of various types of corpora are also the subject of much
work in computational linguistics, speech recognition and machine translation, where
they are often used to create hidden Markov models for part of speech tagging and other
purposes. Corpora and frequency lists derived from them are useful for language
teaching. Corpora can be considered as a type of foreign language writing aid as the
contextualised grammatical knowledge acquired by non-native language users through
exposure to authentic texts in corpora allows learners to grasp the manner of sentence
formation in the target language, enabling effective writing.[1]

Machine translation
Multilingual corpora that have been specially formatted for side-by-side comparison are
called aligned parallel corpora. There are two main types of parallel corpora which
contain texts in two languages. In a translation corpus, the texts in one language are
translations of texts in the other language. In a comparable corpus, the texts are of the
 same kind and cover the same content, but they are not translations of each other.[2] To
exploit a parallel text, some kind of text alignment identifying equivalent text segments
(phrases or sentences) is a prerequisite for analysis. Machine translation algorithms for
translating between two languages are often trained using parallel fragments comprising
a first-language corpus and a second-language corpus, which is an element-for-element
translation of the first-language corpus.[3]

Philologies
Text corpora are also used in the study of historical documents, for example in attempts
to decipher ancient scripts, or in Biblical scholarship. Some archaeological corpora can
be of such short duration that they provide a snapshot in time. One of the shortest
corpora in time may be the 15–30 year Amarna letters texts (1350 BC). The corpus of an
ancient city, (for example the "Kültepe Texts" of Turkey), may go through a series of
corpora, determined by their find site dates.

Some notable text corpora

See also
Concordance
Corpus linguistics
Distributional–relational database
Linguistic Data Consortium
Natural language processing
Natural Language Toolkit
Parallel text alignment
Search engines: they access the "web corpus".
Speech corpus
Translation memory
Treebank
Zipf's Law

References
1. Yoon, H., & Hirvela, A. (2004). ESL Student Attitudes toward Corpus Use in L2 Writing (http
s://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1073.2322&rep=rep1&type=pdf).
Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(4), 257–283. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
2. Wołk, K.; Marasek, K. (7 April 2014). "A Sentence Meaning Based Alignment Method for
Parallel Text Corpora Preparation". Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing.
Springer. 275: 107–114. arXiv:1509.09090 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.09090).
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-05951-8_11 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-319-05951-8_11).
ISBN 978-3-319-05950-1. ISSN 2194-5357 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/2194-5357).
S2CID 15361632 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:15361632).
3. Wolk, Krzysztof; Marasek, Krzysztof (2015). "Tuned and GPU-accelerated parallel data
mining from comparable corpora". In Král, Pavel; Matousek, Václav (eds.). Text, Speech,
and Dialogue – 18th International Conference, TSD 2015, Pilsen, Czech Republic,
September 14–17, 2015, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 9302.
 Springer. pp. 32–40. arXiv:1509.08639 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.08639). doi:10.1007/978-
3-319-24033-6_4 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-319-24033-6_4).

External links
ACL SIGLEX Resource Links: Text Corpora (http://www.clres.com/corp.html) Archived (http
s://web.archive.org/web/20130813141813/http://www.clres.com/corp.html) 2013-08-13 at the
Wayback Machine
Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice (https://archive.today/2012122219
3153/http://www.ahds.ac.uk/linguistic-corpora)
Free samples (not free), web-based corpora (45-425 million words each): American (COCA,
COHA, TIME), British (BNC), Spanish, Portuguese (http://corpus.byu.edu/)
Intercorp (http://ucnk.korpus.cz/intercorp/?lang=en) Building synchronous parallel corpora of
the languages taught at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
Sketch Engine: Open corpora with free access (https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/)
TS Corpus – A Turkish Corpus freely available for academic research. (http://www.tscorpus.c
om/)
Turkish National Corpus – A general-purpose corpus for contemporary Turkish (http://www.tn
c.org.tr/)
Corpus of Political Speeches (https://digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/corpus/index.php), Free access
to political speeches by American and Chinese politicians, developed by Hong Kong Baptist
University Library
Russian National Corpus (https://ruscorpora.ru/en/)

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