McEnery & Wilson Ch 2. "What is a corpus and what is in it?"
FIND ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS
1. CORPORA VS. MACHINE REDABLE TEXTS [quite important]
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Is corpus "any body of text"?
1.1. sampling and representativeness
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What is sampling and why is it necessary?
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How can we ensure for a corpus to be maximally representative?
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Can, in your opinion, a corpus really represent the whole of a language?
1.2. Finite size
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Are all corpora finite in size?
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Is the BNC a monitor corpus?
1.3. Machine-readable form?
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Have all corpora been machine-readable?
1.4. A standard reference
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What is, in McE&W's understanding, the 'standard reference' of a corpus?
II. TEXT ENCODING AND ANNOTATION
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What is the difference between an unannotated corpus and an annotated corpus?
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Name 2-3 most important (in your view) of Leechs' maxims of annotation
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What is the nature of a potential conflict of interest between a corpus end-user and its annotator?
2.1. FORMATS OF ANNOTATION
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What are COCOA references?
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In general terms, what is the difference between a COCOA approach and a more formal corpus annotation style, such as recommended by the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)?
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Is the BNC is a TEI-conformant corpus?
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Do the TEI guidelines constrain the corpus processing methods (e.g. by recommending specific software)?
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Is it easy to concordance a heavily-annotated corpus, in your opinion?
2.2. TYPES OF ANNOTATION
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Which forms of linguistic annotation are the commonest? What may be the reasons for their predominance?
2.2.1. TEXTUAL AND EXTRA-TEXTUAL INFORMATION [quite important]
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What is the difference between textual / extra-textual annotation and linguistic annotation?
2.2.2. ORTHOGRAPHY
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Why is the encoding of orthography a potential problem?
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Why can transcription of spoken data be an encoding problem?
2.2.3. LINGUISTIC ANNOTATIONS [important, bar the heaviest technical sections]. a) PART OF SPEECH ANNOTATION
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What is a POS-tag?
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How can POS tagging help with the disambiguation of homographs?
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What is a tagset?
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What is the difference between a portmanteau tag and a ditto tag?
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What is the current success rate of automatic POS taggers?

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What do McE & W mean by the divisibility of POS tag names?
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In what context do McE & W discuss 'reduced tagsets'? b) LEMMATISATION
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What is lemmatisation?
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Can you think of a reason for which lemmatisation is not widely applied in corpora? c) PARSING
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How is morphosyntactic tagging different from syntactic parsing?
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What are treebanks?
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What is the most common technique for the marking of syntactic patterns in a corpus?
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What is the difference between full parsing and skeleton parsing?
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Can parsing be performed automatically? d) SEMANTICS
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What are the two types of semantic annotation? e) DISCOURSAL AND TEXT LINGUISTIC ANNOTATION
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Provide a few examples of discourse phenomena that can be tagged in a corpus
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What is anaphoric annotation? f) PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION and g) PROSODY
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What is the difference between phonetic transcription and annotation of prosody in a corpus?
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What is prosody? How does it differ from 'semantic prosody'?
PROBLEM-ORIENTED TAGGING
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How does problem-oriented tagging differ from other, standard forms of corpus annotation?
3. MULTILINGUAL CORPORA
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What is the difference between parallel corpora and comparable corpora?
5. STUDY QUESTIONS [fairly important]
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Consider question 3 and propose an answer: Can you see any disadvantages to annotated corpora?