Apologies for cross-posting.
PLANNED COLLOQUIUM ON "THE WEB AS A CORPUS" AT CORPUS LINGUISTICS 2005
MOTIVATION
The World Wide Web is a mine of language data of unprecedented richness
and ease of access (Kilgarriff and Grefenstette 2003). A growing body of
studies has shown that simple algorithms using Web-based evidence are
successful at many linguistic tasks, often outperforming sophisticated
methods based on smaller but more controlled data sources (e.g., Turney
2001, Keller and Lapata 2003), despite the many peculiariites of data that
might be used in this way.
Current Internet-based linguistic studies differ in terms of strategies
used to access Web data. For example, some researchers collect frequency
data directly from commercial search engines (e.g., Turney 2001). Others
use a search engine to find relevant pages, and then retrieve the pages to
build a corpus (e.g., Ghani et al. 2001, Baroni and Bernardini 2004).
Others yet build a corpus by spidering the web and manage the data with an
ad-hoc search engine (e.g., Terra and Clarke 2003).
Different approaches have also been proposed to the task of sharing
web-derived data. For example, some researchers make web-mining tools
available (e.g., Fletcher 2000, Baroni and Bernardini 2004) while others
provide URL lists that allow users to construct web-corpora (e.g., Ghani
et al. 2001, Resnik and Smith 2003), and others yet have proposed
prototypes of Internet search engines for the linguists' community (Kehoe
and Renouf 2002, Fletcher 2002, Kilgarriff 2003, Resnik and and Elkiss
2003).
Many fundamental issues about the viability and exploitation of the
web as a linguistic corpus must still be explored, or are just
starting to be tackled. Some of these issues are of theoretical
interest, such as word frequency distributions and topical biases in
Internet documents, while other pertain to equally important
implementational and practical aspects, such as efficient handling of
massive data sets and the legal standing of indexing for linguistic
purposes.
Thus, we believe that the research on the web as corpus is currently
in a very exciting stage: increasing evidence points to the enormous
potential of the Internet as a source of linguistic data, but we are
still far removed from anything like a working, fully-fledged
linguist's search engine.
CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST
We are planning a colloquium to be held at Corpus Linguistics 2005
(Birmingham, UK, 14-17 July 2005) in which scholars using (or planning to
use) the web as a corpus can meet to share experiences and plans.
Anybody interested in actively participating in the event, by presenting a
paper on a relevant topic and/or a demonstration of an existing system,
should fill up the online expression-of-interest at the address specified
below, as soon as possible, and in any case by DECEMBER 14 2004, to give
us time to prepare the official colloquium proposal to be submitted for
review (deadline for submission of colloquium proposals: January 14 2005).
We will get in touch with those who submitted expressions of interest as
soon as possible, and in any case by early January 2005.
WEB-AS-CORPUS COLLOQUIUM ORGANIZERS
Adam Kilgarriff (Lexicography MasterClass)
Marco Baroni (University of Bologna)
WEB-AS-CORPUS EXPRESSION OF INTEREST FORM
http://sslmit.unibo.it/~baroni/web_as_corpus_cl05.html
CORPUS LINGUISTICS 2005 WEBSITE
http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/conference/
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