Comparable Corpora Research Articles

Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs.

Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

A Simple Yet Robust Algorithm for Automatic Extraction of Parallel Sentences: A Case Study on Arabic-English Wikipedia Articles

Parallel corpora are vital components in several applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in machine translation. In this paper, we present a novel method for automatically creating parallel sentences from comparable corpora. The method requires a bilingual dictionary as well as an adequate word-vectorisation method. We use Arabic and English Wikipedia as a comparable corpus to apply our proposed method and construct a parallel corpus between Arabic and English. The created Arabic-English corpus consists of 105,010 parallel sentences with a total number of 4.6M words. During our study, we compared two methods of word vectorisation, word embedding and term frequency-inverse document frequency, in terms of their usefulness in computing similarities between well-formed and syntactically ill-formed sentences. We also quantitatively and qualitatively examined the parallel corpus produced by our proposed method and compared it with other available Arabic-English parallel corpora counterparts: GlobalVoices, TED, and Wiki-OPUS. We explored the main advantages and shortcomings of these corpora when used for NLP applications, such as word semantic similarity identification and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The word semantic similarity models trained on our parallel corpus outperformed models trained on other corpora in the task of English non-similar word identification. Our parallel corpus also proved competitive when building Arabic-English NMT systems, yielding results comparable to those of the automatically created Wiki-OPUS corpus and of the manually created TED corpus, while achieving results superior to the smaller GlobalVoices corpus.

The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA): Towards a multi-L1 and multi-register learner corpus of disciplinary writing

The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA first release) is the result of an international corpus compilation project that aims to address the lack of large-scale, open access, multi-L1, multi-discipline and multi-register learner corpora. This corpus report provides a detailed description of VESPA and illustrates possible uses of the corpus for register exploration of learner data. Specifically, it first offers an overview of the makeup of the corpus and the online interface that can be used to search and download the corpus. It then gives an illustrative example of a study where multi-dimensional analysis was used to investigate the relative importance of register vis-à-vis other factors in learner academic writing. In the concluding remarks, we identify priorities for future developments in the VESPA project, including the addition of more L1 components, more disciplines and more registers, as well as the compilation of a comparable corpus of native student writing.

The Linguistic and Typological Features of Clickbait in Youtube Video Titles

Abstract This exploratory study aims to identify which linguistic and typological features commonly associated with clickbait in online news headlines are indicative of clickbait in YouTube video titles. A comparative corpus analysis is conducted to compare YouTube video titles commonly associated with clickbait to titles not associated with clickbait. Results indicate that a majority of the typological and linguistic features associated with clickbait in online news headlines are found to be indicative of clickbait in YouTube video titles. However, the role which each of the features plays seems to differ to that of online news. The findings contribute to the understanding of clickbait in non-news contexts from a linguistics perspective, an area which has been relatively unexplored in the current literature.

Culture and the Common European Framework for Languages: A Comparative Corpus Analysis of 2001, 2018 and 2020 Texts

In order to provide “a common basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, etc. across Europe”, The Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) was published in 2001 by the Council of Europe. It has affected the way languages are taught, learnt and assessed and also how foreign language proficiency levels are defined all around the world. The CEFR adopts an intercultural approach to foreign language, and the main purpose is to protect cultural diversity and to give importance to cultural activities rather than being a part of foreign language education. For this reason, culture is at the very core of the CEFR. In 2018 and 2020, two Companion Volumes were published to complement the CEFR. The present paper offers a comparative corpus analysis of these three texts focusing on the occurrences of culture-related items using n-gram tool of Sketch Engine (Lexical Computing, n. d.), which creates frequency lists of sequences of tokens. Based on the findings, it is suggested according to the CEFR that rather than focusing on the national culture of the native speakers of the target language, foreign language education should focus more on the “new culture” formed by the encounters of people coming from different cultures.

Syntactic and Semantic Distribution of the Ingressive Copulas pasidarė and tapo in Modern Lithuanian: A Corpus-based Analysis

Syntactic and Semantic Distribution of the Ingressive Copulas pasidarė and tapo in Modern Lithuanian: A Corpus-based Analysis

Key Noun + Noun Collocations in the Language of Tourism: A Corpus-Based Study of English and Serbian

In this paper, we investigate the main characteristics underlying noun + noun collocations in the English and Serbian language of tourism. Their morpho-syntactic, semantic and communicative features are contrasted and compared in the two languages. Firstly, we compiled two comparable corpora in English and Serbian from the tourism websites of Great Britain and Serbia. Based on their normalized frequencies per 10,000 words, key noun + noun collocations were extracted, using TermoStat Web 3.0 and AntConc. The results showed certain similarities in terms of the prevailing topics in the two corpora, based on the analysis of key noun + noun collocations. However, we found major differences in the two languages in terms of their morpho-syntactic features, communicative focus and the relationship of the collocates. The results of the study have implications for English for Tourism education, tourism discourse studies, language typology and lexicography.

A Corpus-based Contrastive Study on English and Chinese Semantic Prime happen and fasheng in Natural Semantic Metalanguage

This paper reports a corpus-based study on English and Chinese semantic prime happen and fasheng in Natural Semantic Metalanguage. With the aids of computer software Wordsmith 5.0 and SPSS19.0, we conducted a contrastive study on happen and fasheng based on a small English and Chinese comparable corpus constructed by ourselves. By extracting evidence from the corpus, the distribution of happen and fasheng, their syntactic patterns, their colligation types as well as their semantic prosody are identified and analyzed. We found that there is no significant difference between English semantic prime happen and its Chinese counterpart fasheng with respect to their distribution, their syntactic patterns, their colligations, and their semantic prosody. The results reveal that semantic prime happen is identical with its Chinese counterpart fasheng. Thus it provides an evidence to justify the premise of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory.

Collocations and aviation terms

Collocations have a great potencial to the understanding of meanings, senses and concepts of words or terms they compound. In this article, we studied the collocations of the terms “segurança” in Portuguese, and “safety” and “security” in English, in aviation language. Our aims were to search for a better understanding of the studied conceptual units, and to offer a discussion about the role of collocations in Terminology. We built two comparable corpora, one with Portuguese texts from the Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency and the Brazilian Air Force, and another one with English texts from the International Civil Aviation Organization. We focused on the main collocations of the three terms in Portuguese and in English. The theoretical frame we adopted was the Communicative Theory of Terminology (CABRÉ, 1999) and we used the techniques of Corpus Linguistics (TAGNIN, 2010, 2013; BERBER SARDINHA, 2000) to design our methodology, assisted by the software WordSmith Tools, version 6.0. (SCOTT, 2012). We found noun and adjective collocations. The study is addressed to professionals, teachers and tranlators who make use of aviation language. KEY-WORDS: Terms of Aviation; Terminology; Corpus Linguistics; Collocations.

Pollution in Environmental Law: Comparative Corpus Analysis

Abstract Environmental Law has been mostly ignored in terminological knowledge bases (TKBs) on the environment. EcoLexicon, a multilingual and multimodal TKB on the environment, has recently begun to include information on this transversal domain. In this study, comparative corpus analysis is carried out in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to analyse the differences between Environmental Law and Environmental Science from the theoretical and methodological perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (Faber 2012, 2015). More specifically, the focus is on multidimensionality: how concepts change their behaviour according to the context in which they participate. The results show that different facets of the Pollution frame are highlighted and its participants change in the Environmental Law domain as compared to Environmental Science. Finally, the complex multidimensional nature of the Pollution frame is represented in EcoLexicon with a combination of graphical and linguistic expression in conceptual networks and definitions.

The use of context in multiword-term translation

ABSTRACT The quality of a specialized translation depends to a great extent on the treatment of multiword terms (MWTs). Since MWTs are not always adequately described or even included in most terminological resources, translators and terminologists must find other ways to deal with them. One method involves the analysis of parallel texts. Traditionally, parallel texts have been a valuable resource for terminology extraction and knowledge acquisition. They can be compiled as comparable corpora (i.e. collections of texts originally written in the source and target languages). Nevertheless, even though comparable corpora can facilitate translation, many translators are often unfamiliar with corpus query techniques. This paper describes a method that identifies Spanish equivalents of English MWTs in corpora, and also provides translators and terminologists with a set of manual corpus query techniques that help to effectively translate MWTs. The comparable corpus compiled was composed of original English and Spanish texts on wind energy generation. The method proposed is based on distributional semantics and was used to identify and compare contextual elements of the concepts in both languages. The results of our study showed that this procedure simplifies and contributes to the accurate identification of MWT translation equivalents in corpora.

Застосування корпусних технологій у навчанні галузевого перекладу

Corpus technologies (corpora of English and Ukrainian texts and tools for their processing) represent modern specialized discourse and facilitate searching for and comparing different units of translation, which makes them a useful tool for both practicing and trainee translators. The purpose of this article is to determine the role and place of corpus technologies in teaching specialized translation on the example of the oil and gas industry. Comparative and parallel text corpora are characterized. The paper reveals methods of applying mono- and bilingual comparative and parallel corpora and corpus managers for acquiring knowledge about genre-stylistic features of texts; developing skills to distinguish a term and determine its collocation profile and semantic preference; analyze translation techniques; translate collocations, complex noun constructions, verbal phrases, and abbreviations. Examples of relevant exercises and tasks that should be performed at the translation training stage are given. Further research should be aimed at integrating corpus-based tasks into the translation practice stage involving the implementation of a translation project.

Methodological Framework for the Development of an English-Lithuanian Cybersecurity Termbase

The aim of the paper is to present a methodological framework for the development of an English-Lithuanian bilingual termbase in the cybersecurity domain, which can be applied as a model for other language pairs and other specialised domains. It is argued that the presented methodological approach can ensure creation of high-quality bilingual termbases even with limited available resources. The paper touches upon the methods and problems of dataset (corpora) compilation, terminology annotation, automatic bilingual term extraction (BiTE) and alignment, knowledge-rich context extraction, and linguistic linked open data (LLOD) technologies. The paper presents theoretical considerations as well as the arguments on the effectiveness of the described methods. The theoretical analysis and a pilot study allow arguing that: 1) a combination of parallel and comparable corpora enable to considerably expand the amount and variety of data sources that can be used for terminology extraction; this methodology is especially important for less-resourced languages which often lack parallel data; 2) deep learning systems trained by using manually annotated data (gold standard corpora) allow effective automatization of extraction of terminological data and metadata, which enables to regularly update termbases with minimised manual input; 3) LLOD technologies enable to integrate the terminological data into the global linguistic data ecosystem and make it reusable, searchable and discoverable across the Web.

Reformulation Markers in Non-initial Position in Written English and Spanish

This article presents a contrastive analysis of non-initial positions (less common and, therefore, marked) of explanatory reformulation markers in written language in English and Spanish, in relation to their discursive uses. To carry out this analysis, the cases of these markers found in a comparable English-Spanish corpus (Cobuild and CREA) are analyzed. Four positions are established, initial, intermediate, final and independent (Pons 2014), and the results of the non-initial positions are related to the different discursive uses of these markers (Murillo 2012, 2016a, 2016b), taking into account their reformulative and modal uses. The results reveal that the markers in English —particularly that is, but also in other words— display more mobility than those in Spanish —the only one having some mobility is o sea. In addition, regarding their discursive uses, the analysis of the corpus reveals that the markers follow different trends in the two languages.

Warning, or Manipulating in Pandemic Times? A Critical and Contrastive Analysis of Official Discourse Through the English and Spanish News

Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis—linguistic and rhetorical—perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens’ behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves—the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination—that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions—voices of authority—to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain.

An End-to-End Efficient Lucene-Based Framework of Document/Information Retrieval

In the context of big data and the 4.0 industrial revolution era, enhancing document/information retrieval frameworks efficiency to handle the ever‐growing volume of text data in an ever more digital world is a must. This article describes a double-stage system of document/information retrieval. First, a Lucene-based document retrieval tool is implemented, and a couple of query expansion techniques using a comparable corpus (Wikipedia) and word embeddings are proposed and tested. Second, a retention-fidelity summarization protocol is performed on top of the retrieved documents to create a short, accurate, and fluent extract of a longer retrieved single document (or a set of top retrieved documents). Obtained results show that using word embeddings is an excellent way to achieve higher precision rates and retrieve more accurate documents. Also, obtained summaries satisfy the retention and fidelity criteria of relevant summaries.

The Europe of Brexit: a corpus-assisted discourse study of identities in the press

Drawing on a what is known as corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach (Baker et al., 2008), this article will research the construction of different identities by means of the language used in two newspaper articles on Brexit from the Spanish El País and the British The Guardian, to examine how these identities are constructed through media discourse at the time following the Brexit referendum (2016-2018). Media discourse surrounding Brexit is examined under the consideration of media power. A comparable corpus made up of original newspaper articles about Brexit was used to carry out the analysis, identifying statistically significant keywords compared with a reference corpus with the aim of providing an example of how the British and Spanish press construct identity.

Efficient bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora based on formal concepts analysis

AbstractBilingual corpora are an essential resource used to cross the language barrier in multilingual natural language processing tasks. Among bilingual corpora, comparable corpora have been the subject of many studies as they are both frequent and easily available. In this paper, we propose to make use of formal concept analysis to first construct concept vectors which can be used to enhance comparable corpora through clustering techniques. We then show how one can extract bilingual lexicons of improved quality from these enhanced corpora. We finally show that the bilingual lexicons obtained can complement existing bilingual dictionaries and improve cross-language information retrieval systems.

A Systematic Literature Review on Extraction of Parallel Corpora from Comparable Corpora

In today’s Globalized Scenario, the requirement for translation is high and increasing rapidly in the number of fields, but it is difficult to translate everything manually. Machine Translation, which is dependent on corpora availability, is a medium for meeting this high demand for translation. Parallel corpora are used to gain most translation knowledge. But, the number and quality of parallel corpora are critical. Because parallel corpora are not readily accessible for many different language pairs, comparable corpora that are widely accessible can be used to extract parallel corpora. A systematic literature survey is performed on 188 research articles that are published in premier journals, conferences, workshops and book chapters. The research process is carried out while considering the research questions. Different MT systems along with their features are identified. Several datasets and techniques for bilingual lexicon extraction, parallel sentence and fragment extraction are revealed. A proposed architecture and a mind map are also showcased in this review article to provide better clarity regarding parallel data extraction using comparable corpora. The study of the paper will increase readers' understanding of parallel data mining through bilingual lexicons, parallel sentences and fragments.

Hope for the future: An analysis of HOPE/HÅP(E) across genres and languages

This article reports on a contrastive study of the cognate nouns and verbs hope and håp(e) that investigates their lexico-grammatical conditions of use in English vs. Norwegian fiction texts and football match reports. The complex dataset consists of material from a parallel corpus of fiction texts and a comparable corpus of football match reports. An interesting finding is that the verb use outnumbers the noun use in the fiction texts, whereas the noun use outnumbers the verb use in the match reports in both languages. Moreover, the analysis of the lemmas suggests that they have similar potential of use but with slightly different preferences, both across the genres and languages. It is also suggested that the English lemmas are more consistently used in negative contexts than the Norwegian ones. Finally, the method of combining data from two different types of contrastive corpora proved fruitful, as the results become more robust.