A corpus-based investigation of junk emails

Almost everyone who has an email account receives from time to time unwanted emails. These emails can be jokes from friends or commercial product offers from unknown people. In this paper we focus on these unwanted messages which try to promote a product or service, or to offer some “hot” business opportunities. These messages are called junk emails. Several methods to filter junk emails were proposed, but none considers the linguistic characteristics of junk emails. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic features of a corpus of junk emails, and try to decide if they constitute a distinct genre. Our corpus of junk emails was build from the messages received by the authors over a period of time. Initially, the corpus consisted of 1563, but after eliminating the duplications automatically we kept only 673 files, totalising just over 373,000 tokens. In order to decide if the junk emails constitute a different genre, a comparison with a corpus of leaflets extracted from BNC and with the whole BNC corpus is carried out. Several characteristics at the lexical and grammatical levels were identified.

A corpus of 714 full-color images of depth-rotated objects

A set of full-color images of objects is described for use in experiments investigating the effects of in-depth rotation on the identification of three-dimensional objects. The corpus contains up to 11 perspective views of 70 nameable objects. We also provide ratings of the "goodness" of each view, based on Thurstonian scaling of subjects' preferences in a paired-comparison experiment. An exploratory cluster analysis on the scaling solutions indicates that the amount of information available in a given view generally is the major determinant of the goodness of the view. For instance, objects with an elongated front-back axis tend to cluster together, and the front and back views of these objects, which do not reveal the object's major surfaces and features, are evaluated as the worst views.

Designing a model for a corpus-driven dictionary of academic English

University students encounter difficulties with academic English because of its vocabulary, phraseology, and variability, and also because academic English differs in many respects from general English, the language which they have experienced before starting their university studies. Although students have been provided with many dictionaries that contain some helpful information on words used in academic English, these dictionaries remain focused on the uses of words in general English. There is therefore a gap in the dictionary market for a dictionary for university students, and this thesis provides a proposal for such a dictionary (called the Dictionary of Academic English; DOAE) in the form of a model which depicts how the dictionary should be designed, compiled, and offered to students. The model draws on state-of-the-art techniques in lexicography, dictionary-use research, and corpus linguistics. The model demanded the creation of a completely new corpus of academic language (Corpus of Academic Journal Articles; CAJA). The main advantages of the corpus are its large size (83.5 million words) and balance. Having access to a large corpus of academic language was essential for a corpus-driven approach to data analysis. A good corpus balance in terms of domains enabled a detailed domain-labelling of senses, patterns, collocates, etc. in the dictionary database, which was then used to tailor the output according to the needs of different types of student. The model proposes an online dictionary that is designed as an online dictionary from the outset. The proposed dictionary is revolutionary in the way it addresses the needs of different types of student. It presents students with a dynamic dictionary whose contents can be customised according to the user's native language, subject of study, variant spelling preferences, and/or visual preferences (e.g. black and white).

Research cultures and the pragmatic functions of humor in academic research presentations:A corpus-assisted analysis

Based on a corpus of English, German, and Polish spoken academic discourse, this article analyzes the distribution and function of humor in academic research presentations. The corpus is the result of a European research cooperation project consisting of 300,000 tokens of spoken academic language, focusing on the genres research presentation, student presentation, and oral examination. The article investigates difference between the German and English research cultures as expressed in the genre of specialist research presentations, and the role of humor as a pragmatic device in their respective contexts. The data is analyzed according to the paradigms of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). The findings show that humor is used in research presentations as an expression of discourse reflexivity. They also reveal a considerable difference in the quantitative distribution of humor in research presentations depending on the educational, linguistic, and cultural background of the presenters, thus confirming the notion of different research cultures. Such research cultures nurture distinct attitudes to genres of academic language: whereas in one of the cultures identified researchers conform with the constraints and structures of the genre, those working in another attempt to subvert them, for example by the application of humor. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

A hybrid generative/discriminative framework to train a semantic parser from an un-annotated corpus

We propose a hybrid generative/discriminative framework for semantic parsing which combines the hidden vector state (HVS) model and the hidden Markov support vector machines (HM-SVMs). The HVS model is an extension of the basic discrete Markov model in which context is encoded as a stack-oriented state vector. The HM-SVMs combine the advantages of the hidden Markov models and the support vector machines. By employing a modified K-means clustering method, a small set of most representative sentences can be automatically selected from an un-annotated corpus. These sentences together with their abstract annotations are used to train an HVS model which could be subsequently applied on the whole corpus to generate semantic parsing results. The most confident semantic parsing results are selected to generate a fully-annotated corpus which is used to train the HM-SVMs. The proposed framework has been tested on the DARPA Communicator Data. Experimental results show that an improvement over the baseline HVS parser has been observed using the hybrid framework. When compared with the HM-SVMs trained from the fully-annotated corpus, the hybrid framework gave a comparable performance with only a small set of lightly annotated sentences. © 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons.

Corpus-driven lexicography

This paper discusses three important aspects of John Sinclair’s legacy: the corpus, lexicography, and the notion of ‘corpus-driven’. The corpus represents his concern with the nature of linguistic evidence. Lexicography is for him the canonical mode of language description at the lexical level. And his belief that the corpus should ‘drive’ the description is reflected in his constant attempts to utilize the emergent computer technologies to automate the initial stages of analysis and defer the intuitive, interpretative contributions of linguists to increasingly later stages in the process. Sinclair’s model of corpus-driven lexicography has spread far beyond its initial implementation at Cobuild, to most EFL dictionaries, to native-speaker dictionaries (e.g. the New Oxford Dictionary of English, and many national language dictionaries in emerging or re-emerging speech communities) and bilingual dictionaries (e.g. Collins, Oxford-Hachette).

Issues in creating a corpus for EAP pedagogy and research

UK universities are accepting increasing numbers of students whose L1 is not English on a wide range of programmes at all levels. These students require additional support and training in English, focussing on their academic disciplines. Corpora have been used in EAP since the 1980s, mainly for research, but a growing number of researchers and practitioners have been advocating the use of corpora in EAP pedagogy, and such use is gradually increasing. This paper outlines the processes and factors to be considered in the design and compilation of an EAP corpus (e.g., the selection and acquisition of texts, metadata, data annotation, software tools and outputs, web interface, and screen displays), especially one intended to be used for teaching. Such a corpus would also facilitate EAP research in terms of longitudinal studies, student progression and development, and course and materials design. The paper has been informed by the preparatory work on the EAP subcorpus of the ACORN corpus project at Aston University. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Corpus linguistics

Corpora—large collections of written and/or spoken text stored and accessed electronically—provide the means of investigating language that is of growing importance academically and professionally. Corpora are now routinely used in the following fields: The production of dictionaries and other reference materials; The development of aids to translation; Language teaching materials; The investigation of ideologies and cultural assumptions; Natural language processing; and The investigation of all aspects of linguistic behaviour, including vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics.

A statistical analysis of regional variation in adverb position in a corpus of written Standard American English

This paper investigates whether the position of adverb phrases in sentences is regionally patterned in written Standard American English, based on an analysis of a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the United States. Seven measures of adverb position were tested for regional patterns using the global spatial autocorrelation statistic Moran’s I and the local spatial autocorrelation statistic Getis-Ord Gi*. Three of these seven measures were indentified as exhibiting significant levels of spatial autocorrelation, contrasting the language of the Northeast with language of the Southeast and the South Central states. These results demonstrate that continuous regional grammatical variation exists in American English and that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard English.

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed.

Creation of a Digital Corpus of Bulgarian Dialects

The paper presents our considerations related to the creation of a digital corpus of Bulgarian dialects. The dialectological archive of Bulgarian language consists of more than 250 audio tapes. All tapes were recorded between 1955 and 1965 in the course of regular dialectological expeditions throughout the country. The records typically contain interviews with inhabitants of small villages in Bulgaria. The topics covered are usually related to such issues as birth, everyday life, marriage, family relationship, death, etc. Only a few tapes contain folk songs from different regions of the country. Taking into account the progressive deterioration of the magnetic media and the realistic prospects of data loss, the Institute for Bulgarian Language at the Academy of Sciences launched in 1997 a project aiming at restoration and digital preservation of the dialectological archive. Within the framework of this project more than the half of the records was digitized, de-noised and stored on digital recording media. Since then restoration and digitization activities are done in the Institute on a regular basis. As a result a large collection of sound files has been gathered. Our further efforts are aimed at the creation of a digital corpus of Bulgarian dialects, which will be made available for phonological and linguistic research. Such corpora typically include besides the sound files two basic elements: a transcription, aligned with the sound file, and a set of standardized metadata that defines the corpus. In our work we will present considerations on how these tasks could be realized in the case of the corpus of Bulgarian dialects. Our suggestions will be based on a comparative analysis of existing methods and techniques to build such corpora, and by selecting the ones that fit closer to the particular needs. Our experience can be used in similar institutions storing folklore archives, history related spoken records etc.