Corpus Resources, Annotation and Access

Foundational Course
Departament de Traducció i Filologia
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
April 16-20, 2007

Introduction to Corpus Resources, Annotation and Access

Sabine Schulte im Walde
Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Universität Stuttgart

Course Description

This course presents an introduction to corpus resources, combining the theoretical background of corpora, resource examples, annotation levels, and tools for exploitation. First, we motivate corpus resources for empirical linguistics, and describe the properties/problems of corpus data, the levels of annotation, and standardisation efforts. We then relate the annotation levels to appropriate tools and uses for exploitation:

Tokenisation, tagging, lemmatisation are introduced; we present CQP to exploit corpora with linear patterns for e.g. collocations, and unix tools for shallow statistical analyses, e.g. the type-token distinction, sorting, bigrams.
Treebanks are introduced, with cross-linguistic examples; we describe typical complexities (like pp-attachment), and present TIGERSearch as a query tool.
SensEval is introduced as a framework for defining and utilising semantically annotated corpus data; we demonstrate the exploitation of word senses.

Schedule (April 16-20)

Monday, 6-9 pm:
1. Introduction
2. Tokenisation
3. Exercise: Basic Unix Tools and Corpus Frequencies
Tuesday, 7-9 pm:
1. Morpho-Syntactic Annotation
2. Word Distributions
3. Exercise: Tree Tagger and Corpus Query Processor
Wednesday: no class
Thursday, 6-9 pm:
1. Syntactic Annotation
2. Evaluation
3. Exercise: Searching Treebanks with TIGERSearch
Friday, 4-8 pm:
1. Semantic Annotation
2. More Levels of Corpus Annotation
3. Exercise: Semantic Annotation with SALTO

Course Material

Acknowledgements

Most of the course material was adopted from an earlier version of this course at ESSLLI 2006. Thanks to my collegue Heike Zinsmeister who prepared the introduction and the lectures on syntactic annotation and the web as corpus!