LIN392 Working with Corpora: Links

Here are some links that students might find useful while taking this course. If you find additional useful links, let me know. I am always happy to add to the list.

There is no course textbook. Readings will be from the following resources available online:

• Martin Wynne (ed): Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice
• The Python tutorial
• Allen B. Downey, Jeffrey Elkner and Chris Meyers: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python.
• Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper: Natural Language Processing - Analyzing Text with Python and the Natural Language Toolkit

How about some recreational corpus lingistics? Language Log has some fun studies, particularly in Googlometry:

• Nearly no? Almost no? with followups here, here with an introspective analysis, and here
• "Boxes sitting around still unpacked": anything weird about that phrase? with followups here, here, here, and here, with musings on prescriptivism and descriptivism
• Is "far from" becoming an adverb?, with a great discussion of the reliability of Google counts
• Half full or half empty, and more on Google counts
• And apropos of the reliability of Google counts...
• Do women really produce more words than men? Let's ask a corpus.
• The shape of a spoken phrase
• Google counts and French politics, and other corpus studies by Jean Veronis
• In the circumstances? under? within??
• Variations over a phrase: I am X, hear me Y
• As he is known as?
• Would you like fewer politics, or rather fewer physics?, with followup
• "Why are negations so easy to fail to miss?"
• Gone fishing? Gone it alone?

Search tools:

• tregex: a powerful tool for searching syntactically analyzed corpora (though the query language is quite complex) (link currently unavailable, hopefully back soon)
  
• The IMS corpus workbench

• The TreeTagger part-of-speech tagger, available for many languages
• The FreeLing corpus analysis tools for Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and a few other languages, and an online demo
• Marco Baroni's collection of tools and resources, particularly for Italian

• Bookmarks for Corpus-based Linguists: http://tiny.cc/corpora

Here is an online tutorial.

Installing Python:

• Here is the download page for Python. In the course, we use version 2.7.7.
• Here is the installation information for the Natural Language Toolkit
• The Python library documentation