Designing and Evaluating Language Corpora
A Practical Framework for Corpus Representativeness

This volume introduces a new framework for conceptualizing and achieving corpus representativeness in a rigorous, yet practical way.

Jesse Egbert (Author), Douglas Biber (Author), Bethany Gray (Author)

9781316605882, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 April 2022

250 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.44 kg

Corpora are ubiquitous in linguistic research, yet to date, there has been no consensus on how to conceptualize corpus representativeness and collect corpus samples. This pioneering book bridges this gap by introducing a conceptual and methodological framework for corpus design and representativeness. Written by experts in the field, it shows how corpora can be designed and built in a way that is both optimally suited to specific research agendas, and adequately representative of the types of language use in question. It considers questions such as 'what types of texts should be included in the corpus?', and 'how many texts are required?' – highlighting that the degree of representativeness rests on the dual pillars of domain considerations and distribution considerations. The authors introduce, explain, and illustrate all aspects of this corpus representativeness framework in a step-by-step fashion, using examples and activities to help readers develop practical skills in corpus design and evaluation.

1. Introduction
2. Approaches to representativeness in previous corpus linguistic research
3. Corpus representativeness: a conceptual and methodological framework
4. Domain considerations
5. Distribution considerations
6. The influence of domain and distribution considerations on corpus representativeness – bringing it all together
7. Corpus design and representativeness in practice
Glossary
Appendix A. Example articles documenting existing corpora
Appendix B. Survey of corpus design and compilation practices.

Subject Areas: Research methods: general [GPS], Data analysis: general [GPH], Computational linguistics [CFX], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]