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LTC 2011: Human Language Technology Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics pp 238–249Cite as

Lexical Bundles in Swedish Secondary School Textbooks

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8387))

Abstract

The present paper describes the process of identifying lexical bundles, i.e., frequently recurring word sequences such as by means of and in the end of, in secondary school history and physics textbooks. In its determination of finding genuine lexical bundles, i.e. the word boundaries between lexical bundles and surrounding arbitrary words, it proposes a new approach to come to terms with the problem of extracting overlapping bundles of different lengths. The results of the structural classification indicate that history uses more NP/PP-based and less dependent-clause-based bundles than physics. The comparative analysis manages to restrict this difference to the referential function. History almost only refers to phrases, i.e. within clauses, while physics much more tends to make references across clauses. The article also includes a report on an extension of the study, ongoing work where the automatic identification of multi-word expressions in general is in focus.

The research reported here was supported in part by the Swedish Research Council (through the project Swedish FrameNet++, VR dnr 2010–6013), and by the University of Gothenburg (through its support of the Centre for Language Technology and Språkbanken/the Swedish Language Bank).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is a bit like attempting to discover the words in un-word segmented text by looking at the frequency of, e.g., four-character sequences, which seems to be an exercise of doubtful value.

  2. 2.

    Although it is not very obvious what can be concluded about the language system or the mental lexicon of the language user from the attested high text frequency of a sequence like in the case of the cited by Biber and Conrad [11]. See Sect. 2.1.

  3. 3.

    http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jpl

  4. 4.

    A normalisation gives 30 and 50 times/MW for physics and history respectively.

  5. 5.

    http://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/resource/saldo

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Språkbanken, Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Judy Ribeck & Lars Borin

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  1. Judy Ribeck
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  2. Lars Borin
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Correspondence to Judy Ribeck .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Zygmunt Vetulani

  2. IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Joseph Mariani

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Ribeck, J., Borin, L. (2014). Lexical Bundles in Swedish Secondary School Textbooks. In: Vetulani, Z., Mariani, J. (eds) Human Language Technology Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics. LTC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8387. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08958-4_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08958-4_20

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