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In the Garden and in the Jungle

Comparing Genres in the BNC and Internet

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Genres on the Web

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 42))

Abstract

The jungle metaphor is quite common in genre studies. This paper presents a set of genre categories to compare web-derived corpora to their traditional counterparts (such as the BNC), and a set of methods for automatic assessment of the genre composition of newly collected webcorpora.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Throughout this chapter I refer to BNC texts using their ids from the BNC Index, which is available from http://clix.to/davidlee00

  2. 2.

    The quote refers to the purposes Michael Halliday intended for his “Introduction to Functional Grammar” [11].

  3. 3.

    This example assumes that the function of narration is actively used in the respective societies for approximately the same purposes, but for modern corpora this can be taken for granted.

  4. 4.

    A similar pattern is evident in the accuracy drop from about 90% in the “crisp” 7-webgenre corpus to 66% in a fuzzy KI-04 corpus in experiments described in [22].

  5. 5.

    The BNC has been retagged with TreeTagger, the same tool used for tagging I-EN, so there was no difference in the tagset and tagging between the two corpora (this could have caused variations in accuracy otherwise).

  6. 6.

    The use of keywords for genre detection has been studied, e.g., in [29] or [8].

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Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Silvia Bernardini, Adam Kilgarriff, Katja Markert and Marina Santini for useful discussions. The usual disclaimers apply. The tools for genre classification described in this chapter and the results of classifications of the Internet corpora are available from http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/serge/webgenres/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    Serge Sharoff

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  1. Serge Sharoff
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Correspondence to Serge Sharoff .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Text Technology/Applied Comp. Ling., Bielefeld University, Universitätsstrasse 25, Bielefeld, 33615, Germany

    Alexander Mehler

  2. LS2 9JT Leeds, United Kingdom

    Serge Sharoff

  3. Varvsgatan 25, Stockholm, 117 29, Sweden

    Marina Santini

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Sharoff, S. (2010). In the Garden and in the Jungle. In: Mehler, A., Sharoff, S., Santini, M. (eds) Genres on the Web. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9178-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9178-9_7

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