Labels: automation

Adam Kilgarriff

Auckland 2012 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 2

Which words are:

Most distinctive of business English? Most often in plural?

For eg English nouns

Most often used in gerund? For eg Spanish verbs

Auckland 2012 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 3

Common issue for lexicographers

Ordinary cases No need to say anything in dictionary

Extreme cases (“most X”) Needs saying

Auckland 2012 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 4

Not hard in principle

Given the right corpus For each word

Count, under condition 1 Eg plural instances

Count, under condition 2 Eg all instances

Compute ratio Sort all words according to ratio Words at top of list are most X

Auckland 2012 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 5

In practice

Programming task Big corpora: big and slow Slightly different each time Very rarely done

(except Keywords in WordSmith)

Now: automated in Sketch Engine demo

Auckland 2012 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 6

FindX specification file: type 1=plural nameQ1 [lempos="%s" & tag="NN2"]Q2 [lempos="%s" & tag="NN[10]"]

The two queries to compare frequencies for lempos="%s" means the list we want is a list of lempos (lemma + pos)

RE ^[a-z]+-n$ items matching this RegExp only

(here: all-lower-case nouns)

Auckland 2012 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 7

FindX specification file: type 2

=passive

nameHR passives

human-readable name (optional)WS passive

use the word sketch relation ‘passive’RE -v$

only for items matching this RegExp (here: only verbs) (optional)