Ebook: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistically Annotated Corpora

Bloomsbury, 2015. — 321 pp.The idea for this textbook emerged when Sandra was teaching corpus linguistics to linguistics and computational linguistics students at Indiana University. One of the goals of this course was to demonstrate to her students how useful annotated corpora and tools established in computational linguistics are. She soon realized the two groups of students differed considerably with regard to prior knowledge. Many concepts that were familiar to her computational linguistics students were new to the linguists. She also found it necessary to introduce students to tools that allow easy access to corpora, especially those that go beyond pure text. Annotated corpora offer two types of challenges: On the one hand, they provide annotations that are often not familiar to linguists. Annotations need to cover complete texts, and thus many phenomena that are not well discussed in linguistic literature. For this reason, they tend to make fewer distinctions than linguistic analyses. On the other hand, the search in annotations requires specialized search tools, which are difficult to figure out on one’s own. Additionally, the documentation of annotations and of tools often assumes knowledge that is not readily available to an uninitiated user. The goal of this book is to bridge the knowledge gap between linguistic users and the available documentation of the resources, as well as to promote the use of linguistically annotated corpora to the linguistic community in general.
This book has been a true collaboration between the two authors, with Sandra bringing her expertise in word-level and syntactic annotation to the project and Heike her expertise in semantic and dialogue annotation. But the final form was determined through dialogue. In the end, we both learned a lot about the topics covered in the book, and we also learned that the book is more than the sum of its parts.Introduction
Corpus Linguistics
Corpora and Linguistic Annotation
Linguistic Annotation
Linguistic Annotation on the Word Level
Syntactic Annotation
Semantic Annotation
Discourse Annotation
Using Linguistic Annotation in Corpus Linguistics
Advantages and Limitations of Using Linguistically Annotated Corpora
Corpus Linguistics Using Linguistically Annotated Corpora
Querying Linguistically Annotated Corpora
Concordances
Regular Expressions
Searching on the Word Level
Querying Syntactic Structures
Searching for Semantic and Discourse Phenomena
Penn Treebank POS Tagset
ICE POS Tagset