Writing with open tools

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10/04/2023 Alannah Fitzgerald

Writing with Open Tools

(Part One)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikekline/265954619/

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Introducing Corpus LinguisticsLexical knowledge: collocations, derivatives, registerThe Flexible Language Acquisition Project (FLAX)The British National Corpus (BNC)The LextutorThe Academic Wordlist (AWL) EAP practice resources

Overview (part one)

Intro to corpus linguistics

Let’s start with three questions about English:

1. What is the meaning of goalless?2. How is the word shall used in present-day

British English? Think of some examples.3. Which is more commonly expressed in

everyday English?a. “I was a little disappointed…”b. “I was very disappointed…”

Adapted from Hoffmann et al., 2008

British National Corpus

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Focus on representation

The British National Corpus (BNC)100 million-word static corpus 1978-1992

Spoken (10%); Written (90%); Domain representation

BNCweb concordancer – free download

http://bncweb.info/

BNC header information

http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=home

Focus on automation

The Flexible Language Acquisition Project (FLAX)Web n-gram corpora generated and supplied by 2006 Google web dump

500,000 words and 380 million five-gramsGALL - Google Assisted Language Learning

(Chinnery, 2008; Shei, 2008)

‘Goalless’ keyword search in FLAX

http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?

Distribution of shall I/we in the spoken component of the BNC

Distribution of I/we shall in the spoken component of the BNC

FLAX - Samples retrieved for I was a little disappointed

BNC - Samples retrieved for I was a little disappointed

FLAX Web Collocations Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

BNC – Samples retrieved for I was very disappointed

FLAX vs BNC?

• Limitations with representativeness Identifying register on the Web is difficult Successful corpora are based on domains,

genres, collections of document types The web is a “dirty corpus” Kilgariff &

Grefenstette (2003, p. 342)

FLAX cleaned by 30% using BNC wordlist Linked externally to BNC, Yahoo

Complementary sources, both with limitations

Google’s terms of services

“You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google.”

http:www.google.com/accounts/TOS Clause 5.3

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Typical lexical errors

a. He’s very humorous. He’s always doing jokes.

b. We conversated for almost one hour.

c. …and compromise, the issue was resolved in a jiffy.

telling

collocation

conversed

word families / derivatives

without delay

register

http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=home

OSS Mozilla

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hindrik/2586245939/

21 FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

22FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

Noticing Text Types – Issues of Register and Genre

23FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

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Web Pronouns Phrases OER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns4nXsZQmUA

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Kibbitzers (Tim John’s EAP pages)

http://www.lexically.net/TimJohns/Kibbitzer/timeap3.

htm

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Web Collocations (fact vs idea)

http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=g&rt=r&sa=CollocationSearch&s=CollocationTypes&s1.wordClass=n&c=collodb&s1.query=&s1.multiple=

on

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Web Collocations (fact vs idea)

Compleat Lexical Tutor (Tom Cobb)

http://www.lextutor.ca/

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Web Collocations OERhttp://www.lextutor.ca/vp/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyZgZhHMovI

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AWL Exercises (Nottingham)

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm

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UEFAP (Andy Gillett)

http://www.uefap.com/index.htm

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Specific EAP vocab (UEFAP)

http://www.uefap.com/vocab/vocfram.htm

FLAX User guides & demos

FLAX Web Collocations & Phrases Excercises (by Shaoqun Wu http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~shaoqun/tmp/instruction.html)

Speaking & Listening OER for EAP

http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/crunch/

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Web Phrases OER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n67FBqBFm6I

36 FLAX Web Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

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• Samples of your own writing – soft copy• Build your own corpus – collect ten

academic articles in your discipline• Writing analysis tools• Specific academic word lists

Preparation (part two)