WebCorp: providing a renewable data source for corpus linguists
antoinette renouf
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Abstract
The many electronic text corpora available nowadays present ever fewer obstacles to a wide range of corpus linguistic study. However, corpora are expensive resources to create and to update, and there remain problems for linguists if they seek access to very large, very recent, or changing language. The World Wide Web, whilst intended as an information source, is an obvious resource for the retrieval of linguistic information, being the largest store of texts in existence, freely-available, covering a range of domains, and constantly added to and updated. Individual linguistic researchers have been trying to retrieve instances of rare or neologistic language use from the web by manipulating existing web search engines. Whilst this strategy is possible, in particular via Google, the output is rather haphazard and not linguist-friendly. The Research and Development Unit for English Studies has been seeking to remedy the situation through the creation of' 'WebCorp', a tool designed to search the Internet and provide on-line tailored access to linguists. A demonstration tool is available at
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