the bnc design model adam kilgarriff, sue atkins, michael rundell the lexicography masterclass

The BNC Design Model

Adam Kilgarriff, Sue Atkins, Michael Rundell

The Lexicography MasterClasshttp://www.lexmasterclass.com

Birmingham Jul 2007 Kilgarriff Atkins Rundell 2

BNC

Very widely used across Lexicography Linguistics Language technology Language teaching

A spectacular success

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The BNC design model

Well planned Atkins Clear Ostler 1992

Produced a successful outcome A model for others (working on

other languages) to follow

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Czech National Corpus American National Corpus Hungarian National Corpus Hellenic National Corpus Croatian National Corpus Slovak National Corpus National Corpus for Ireland

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Great! However

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BNC Design Model past its

sell-by

Adam Kilgarriff, Sue Atkins, Michael Rundell

The Lexicography MasterClasshttp://www.lexmasterclass.com

Birmingham Jul 2007 Kilgarriff Atkins Rundell 9

BNC Design Model

1980s Eighteen years old Pre-web

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Sue Atkins’ dream, ca 1985 The dream

Gazillions of text More than we could possibly imagine

The plan Let’s reach for the sky:

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Amazing

implausibleridiculous

you won’t possibly do it

100 million: you must be kidding

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2007: Google

everyday access to eighty thousand times as much

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Inference

Vision behind the BNC (gazillions, reach for the sky) leads to 1980s: the BNC 2007: something quite different

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BNC vision: other aspects

A balance of text types Substantial share (10%) spoken No swingeing copyright constraints A reference corpus

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Balance of text types Good goal – added value for BNC Design by linguists and publishers

Reflects their ideas/interests Constrained by collection costs Prescribes not describes

Costs now quite different Blogs etc are free

“What is a good taxonomy of text types” Good open research question

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Spoken language Many things are possible

Online transcripts Hoffman: 300m words of Larry King show

Web 2.0 cheese Whole BNC: 2,954 occurrences Spoken BNC: 456 occurrences Youtube: 34,900 videos

Everyzing.com audio search (formerly podzinger) cheese: 37,030 files

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  Play Here 0:18:23 ...

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Copyright BNC isn’t do-as-you-like

Compare WordNet Corpus collectors are like search

engines Copyright and Web 2:

Website’s defense: “we did not know it was there and will

promptly remove it” OK in US law

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A reference corpus

“a reference point for the language” Balanced Fixed

Experiments are replicable Freely available Size might not be important

Brown still works well for many questions

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1990s Corpus building: expensive Wanted for many purposes

One-size-fits-all BNC met many needs

Many text types have too few documents

Medical, technical, children’s Used ‘because it is available’

No affordable alternatives

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2007

Corpus building: cheap WebBootCaT

Made-to-measure corpora

Different research question: different corpus

Is “general-purpose reference corpus” a useful idea?

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In sum: BNC Design Model

1990s innovative and inspiring

2007 historic interest

New thinking needed for a new situation