the logDice score in Word Sketches

Dice score gives very good results of collocation candidates. The only problem is that the values of the Dice score are usually very small numbers. We have defined logDice to fix this problem.

Values of the logDice have the following features:
– Theoretical maximum is 14, in case when all occurrences of X co-occur with Y and all occurrences of Y co-occur with X. Usually the value is less then 10.

– Value 0 means there is less than 1 co-occurrence of XY per 16,000 X or 16,000 Y. We can say that negative values means there is no statistical significance of XY collocation.

– Comparing two scores, plus 1 point means twice as often collocation, plus 7 points means roughly 100 times frequent collocation.

– The score does not depend on the total size of a corpus. The score combine relative frequencies of XY in relation to X and Y.

All these characteristics are useful orientation points for any field linguist working with collocation candidate lists.

From: A Lexicographer-Friendly Association Score, by Pavel Rychlý

A taxonomy of learner searches in DDL

 

Learners’ search patterns during corpus-based focus-on-form activities: A study on hands-on concordancing

Authors: Pérez-Paredes, Pascual; Sánchez-Tornel, María; Calero, Jose M. Alcaraz
Source: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Volume 17, Number 4, 2012, pp. 482-515(34)
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Abstract:
Our research explores the search behaviour of EFL learners (n=24) by tracking their interaction with corpus-based materials during focus-on-form activities (Observe, Search the corpus, Rewriting). One set of learners made no use of web services other than the BNC during the central Search the corpus activity while the other set resorted to other web services and/or consultation guidelines. The performance of the second group was higher, the learners’ formulation of corpus queries on the BNC was unsophisticated and the students tended to use the BNC search interface to a great extent in the same way as they used Google or similar services. Our findings suggest that careful consideration should be given to the cognitive aspects concerning the initiation of corpus searches, the role of computer search interfaces, as well as the implementation of corpus-based language learning. Our study offers a taxonomy of learner searches that may be of interest in future research.

Writing tools for researchers

This is a selection of resources for those wishing to improve their scientific and academic writing in English. It showcases some online resources including courses, academic word lists, online data bases, concordancers, corpora as well as some diy tools.

Online courses

British Council Writing for a purpose

Face to face & online courses

VI Escribir ciencia en inglés / Writing science in English (Universidad de Murcia)

Word lists

AWL and definitions. Academic Word List Coxhead (2000). Around  570 headwords

AWL 10 sublists and sublist families

Exploring contexts of AWL (dictionary-based)  and academic areas  (needs a code)

Test your vocabulary range using Lex Tutor

The Manchester Phrase Bank

Exploring collocations

Oxford online collocations dictionary

Collocation forbetterenglish (Sketch Engine SKELL): examples, word sketches and similar words

Word neighbors (different corpora available)

String net (explore patterns)

Collocaid: collocation errors and editor

Using Google N-GRAM to discover word combinations (intake of *)

Online corpora

Academic words in American English (Mark Davies COCA)

CRA (Corpus of Research Articles) Great to test your hypothesis (perform an analysis?)

MICUSP

MICASE

British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE) Sketch engine gateway

BAWE corpus (Coventry site)

ScienQuest

CQPweb portal

Deconstructing discourse

Clean your text 

Generate word lists (Input url)

Ngram Analyzer

Ngram Extractor

Web as a corpus (n-gram browser)

Online text comparator

Google books Ngram Viewer Use it to test phraseological uses  All the options here

Online DBs

Exploration tools:

Ngramfinder

Babla (just for fun)

Netspeak

Video talks

Webcorp (The web is your corpus)

Springer exemplar

Taporware tools (Alberta)

Concordancers

Antconc (Win, MacOS, lINUX)

Textstat (Windows & MacOS)

Do-it-yourself tools & Advanced users

Just-text

Beautifulsoup parser (Python)

Avoid deduplication: Onion

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Using COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English)

For more information on research group and interests, visit our website: Languages for specific purposes, language corpora, and English linguistics applied to knowledge engineering.

#CFP The 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-10) Submission deadline: 24 April 2015

First Call for Papers
10 August 2015, Herstmonceux Castle, UK
Submission deadline: 24 April 2015

Endorsed by the Special Interest Group of the ACL on Web as Corpus

The web has become increasingly popular as a source of linguistic data, not only within the NLP community, but also with lexicographers and linguists. Accordingly, web corpora continue to gain importance, given their size and diversity in terms of genres/text types. However, a number
of issues in web corpus construction still need much research, ranging from questions of corpus design to more-technical aspects of efficient construction of large corpora. Similarly, the systematic evaluation of web corpora, for example in the form of task-based comparisons to traditional
corpora, has only lately shifted into focus.

For a decade now, the ACL SIGWAC, and especially the highly successful Web as Corpus (WAC) workshops, have served as a platform for researchers interested in building and working with web-derived corpora. Past workshops have been co-located with EACL, NAACL, LREC, WWW, and Corpus Linguistics.

This year we are excited to be collocated with Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: linking lexical data in the digital age (eLex 2015). This will be the first time that WAC has co-located with a lexicography conference.

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

As in previous years, the 10th Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-10) invites original contributions pertaining to all aspects of web corpora, including data collection, cleaning, duplicate removal, document filtering, linguistic post-processing and annotation, and the use of web corpora in
language technology and linguistics. Because of its co-location with a lexicography conference, WAC-10 particularly encourages submissions related to the use of web corpora in lexicography.

A major challenge in the construction of web corpora is the question of the quality and the evaluation of both the software used in the construction of web corpora as well as the corpora themselves. WAC10 encourages submissions related to these issues.

SUBMISSION FORMAT

All submissions should follow the ACL-IJCNLP 2015 style guidelines and must be in PDF format.

Full paper submissions may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content plus any number of pages consisting of only references. Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content plus any number of pages consisting of only references. Full papers will be distinguished from short papers in the proceedings.

Papers will be presented either orally or as posters at the workshop. There will be no distinction between papers presented orally and those presented as posters in the proceedings.

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors’ names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith (1991)
previously showed …”. Papers not conforming to these requirements will be rejected without review.

We strongly recommend the use of the ACL-IJCNLP 2015 LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word Style files. The style files and example documents will be available from the workshop website. We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not conform to these styles including font and page
size restrictions.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

    Paul Cook, University of New Brunswick (paul.cook@unb.ca)
    Roland Schäfer, Freie Universität Berlin (roland.schaefer@fu-berlin.de)
    Egon Stemle, EURAC (egon.stemle@eurac.edu)

PROGRAMM COMMITTEE (Confirmed so far)

    Andrea Abel, European Academy Bolzano / Bozen
    Felix Bildhauer, Freie Universität Berlin
    Jesse Egbert, Brigham Young University
    Stefan Evert, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
    Simon Krek, Jožef Stefan Institute
    Lothar Lemnitzer, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
    Robert Lew, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
    Nikola Ljubešić, University of Zagreb
    Carolin Müller-Spitzer, Institut für Deutsche Sprache
    Siva Reddy, University of Edinburgh
    Steffen Remus, TU Darmstadt
    Pavel Rychly, Masaryk University
    Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds
    Yukio Tono, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
    Andreas Witt, Institut für Deutsche Sprache
    Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen

IMPORTANT DATES

    24 April 2015: Paper submission deadline (23:59 GMT-12)
    29 May 2015: Notification
    19 June 2015: Camera-ready deadline
    10 August 2015: WAC-10 Workshop