Online corpus: Literacy teachers' best friend

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Online CorpusLiteracy Teachers’

Best Friend

Dominik Lukešhttp://dominiklukes.net

Dyslexia Guild Summer Conference 2011

Outline

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What is a corpus

Answering questions with a corpus

The language of corpus searches

The corpus and the classroom

Practice

Corpus / Corpora

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????

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of about

language

knowledge

http://www.flickr.com/photos/missturner/3029700617/

Prescriptivism

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… how language should be used

Descriptivism

… how language is used

v

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“Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago… For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them…”

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“intellectual abdication”“should be ashamed”

“current around 1900” “a perversion of grammatical

education” “blind to textual evidence even

when he himself exhibits it”

“dishonest and stupid”

“vile little compendium of tripe about style”

Grammarian Geoffrey K Pullum on …

“More passives in Orwell's pompous essay with the warning about how you

mustn't use them than in any periodical you can lay your

hands on! “

This usage stuff is not straightforward and easy. If ever someone tells you that the rules of English grammar are simple and logical and you should just learn them and obey them, walk away, because you're getting advice from a fool.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2790

Corpus

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Key modern tool for finding out about how language works…

Corpus

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… is a large database of representative language samples …

Corpus

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… 100s of millions of words from (mostly) written language in different genres in small samples (~2000 words) …

Corpus

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… used for linguistic research, making dictionaries, writing grammars, …

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Corpora available for teachers

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http://corpus.byu.edu

Access to COCA and related BYU corpora is free…

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…but free registration required for more than ~10 queries a day

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Brown – the grandfatherCOCABNCWebcorpGoogle

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training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk

training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk

http://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/3900591006/

Searching a corpus early on in the process of making a generalization can save you a lot of unpleasant surprises later.

How do we use the word dyslexia?

We speak more often of dyslexic children than adults.

We speak more often of dyslexia than any other dys- word.

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ConcordanceBNC:dyslexic [n*]

COCA: dyslexic [n*]

http://www.americancorpus.org/

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc

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COCA:dys*

Suffixing rules

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*yed

*ied

Suffixing rules

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*yed

*ied

playedstayed

portrayedenjoyed

unemployedsurveyed

diedtried

marriedworried

identifiedapplied

The Corpus Magic

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*

[ ]

?

Different corpora use slightly different codes. Read the

manual.

[n* ]

The Corpus Magic

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*[ ]

?Any one character

Any number ofcharacters (incl 0)

Lemma (all inflectional

forms of a word)

Different corpora use slightly different codes. Read the

manual.

[n* ]Part of speech tags

(e.g. nouns)

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**each each, reach, beach, teach,

outreach, …, impeach, …

teach* teachers, teaching, …, teachable, teacher-librarians, …

t*ch touch, teach, tech, torch, trench, twitch, …, three-inch, …

teach * teach the, teach us, teach students, …

training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk

??each reach, beach, teach, peach,

leach, keach, …

each? each- (1), each# (1) [ie nothing]

?each? peachy, bleachy, teacha, reachs (2) [ie spelling error], …

t?ch tech, tach, toch, tuch, tsch, tich

t??ch touch, teach, torch, tisch, …

[Lemma]

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Part of speech tags

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[run].[n*]

[run] [n*]

Common tags

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[n*] noun[NN2] plural nouns

[v*] verb[VVD] verb past tense

[aj*] (BNC) / [j*](COCA) adjective[av*] (BNC) / [r*](COCA) adverb

Help

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training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk

training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk

You can also

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cats and dogs search for idioms

?each*s combine wildcards

[=pretty] search for synonyms

car|bike|horse search for alternatives

used -car exclude searches

For more details see:

Concordance + KWIC

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*ies.[N*]

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KWIC – Key-Word In Context

*ies.[N*]

Limit searches by genre

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Other questions corpus can answerAre there more nouns or verbs ending in -ies?

*ies.[V*] vs. *ies.[N*]

Are there four-letter verbs ending in -ed in the present tense? ??ed.[VVB]

What are the most common adjectives describing students vs. pupils. [j*] [student] vs. [j*] [pupil]

What do we say teachers do most often? [teacher] [vvb]

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Corpus, rules, and regularity

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/51505078@N00/352492687

pre*

*ed

*ies.[V*]

CollocationsLimits on variability

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See also Kennedy, p. 80-23

Collocations (cont)Limits on variability

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See also Kennedy, p. 80-23

Collocations (cont)

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[teacher] must [v*]

Idioms and set phrases

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275 results

359 results

Google as a Corpus

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"put the search text in quotes"

use * for the search item

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Google as a Corpus Pros & Cons

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PRO: rare, low frequency usage, uptodate usage

CON: no sampling, no frequency sort, no genre limit, no part of speech tags

Google results counts are only rough estimates…

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http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-properly-53559

Different people searching in different geographic locations can get different numbers

Sometimes searching for A gives fewer results than searching for A without B

…but Google fights can be fun training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk

WebCorp is makes Google search results linguist-friendly

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Avoid Common Corpus Errors

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Be aware of limitations: sampling, coverage, size, presence of typos and errors, bad part of speech tagging

Beware of low frequency results

Beware of homographs

Check results come from multiple sources

Check KWIC to confirm relevance

Limit search by genre http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreassolberg/433734311

Check examples and sources

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Always check low frequency results

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must [v*] [n*]

…sometimes they come from the same source

False roots

http://etymonline.com

corner, silly, preface, cockroach, protest, stable …

Make your own corpus with TextSTAT

http://neon.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/en/textstat

Make your own corpus with AntConc

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http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html

Corpus in the classroom

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teacher preparation

student discovery

Teacher preparation

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find relevant, common examples prepare worksheets check for exceptions find out answers to student

questions about rules and usage

Student discovery

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show search results to students to work out rules or word meanings

teach students how to search for questions

ask students to give each other puzzles for searching

For heavy classroom use…

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register for group access to prevent spam lock out

Corpus v dictionary

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Non-classroom corpus use

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supplement dictionary

cross-word puzzles

check typical usage when writing

Where to go next?

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http://www.corpora4learning.net

Thank youContact http://dominiklukes.net

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