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Creating an interoperable language resource for interoperable linguistic studies

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Abstract

There are two different levels of interoperability for language resources: operational interoperability and conceptual interoperability. The former refers to the standardization of the formal aspects of language resources so that different resources can work together. The latter refers to the standardization of the notional representation of the semantic content of the analysis. This article addresses both issues but focuses on the latter through a description of the annotation and analysis of the International Corpus of English, which is a corpus for the study of English as a global language. The project is parameterised by component, regional sub-corpora and a set of pre-defined textual categories. The one-million-word British component has been constructed, grammatically tagged, and syntactically parsed. This article is first of all a description of steps taken to ensure conformity within the project. These include corpus design, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing. The article will then present a study that examines the use of adverbial clauses across speech and writing, illustrating the imminent necessity for interoperable analysis of linguistic data.

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Notes

  1. The X axis in Fig. 3 has legends indicating the proportion of adverbial clauses in the following groups of samples in ICE–GB:

    • Spon: spontaneous conversations

    • Speech: complete spoken samples

    • Scripted: scripted broadcast news and talks

    • Timed: timed university essays

    • Writing: complete written samples

    • Untimed: untimed university essays.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by research grants from City University of Hong Kong (Project Nos 7002387, 7008002, 9610126 and 9610053).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Alex Chengyu Fang

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  1. Alex Chengyu Fang
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Correspondence to Alex Chengyu Fang.

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Fang, A.C. Creating an interoperable language resource for interoperable linguistic studies. Lang Resources & Evaluation 46, 327–340 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9189-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-012-9189-9

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