Introduction to Sketch Engine
Abstracts
Friday 8th, plenary
Linguistic exploration with the Sketch Engine
Adam Kilgarriff
Linguists want to find things out about language, and it always helps
to have access to examples of the bit of language you are interested
in. This is possible as never before. We all know how we can use
Google to find examples, but often Google does not get us the sample
we need. The Sketch Engine is a corpus tool, like Google in ease of
use, covering over forty languages, which makes it easy to find
representative examples, for words, phrases or grammatical
constructions. It uses computational linguistics technologies to
automatically prepare a summary, or 'word sketch' for the word. It is
in use for lexicography, for various languages, at OUP, CUP, Collins,
Macmillan and Le Robert. I shall show how we can let the tool do the
harmless drudgery in our work on lexis, grammar, language variation -
and in high-stakes legal cases of determining whether a word like
'hoover' or 'botox' can properly be registered as a trademark!
Sunday 10th, workshop
Using the Sketch Engine
Adam Kilgarriff, Siva Reddy, Ravi Kiran
The Sketch Engine is a corpus tool which supports many varieties of
linguistic research. Everyone registering for the Linguistics
Institute will receive a Sketch Engine account as part of the package.
In the workshop we shall show how to build 'instant corpora' from the
web, how to install your own corpus into the Sketch Engine (with no
software required: you upload the corpus and all the work is done on
our server) and how to use the Sketch Engine for a wide range of
linguistic queries, on the large corpora that we provide (for over 40
languages) or on ones that you build yourselves. The three of us will
be available at the workshop and for the duration of the Linguistics
Institute for anyone wanting help with using the Sketch Engine. We'd
like to make this hands-on, so bring your laptops and Sketch Engine
registration details!
Due to popular demand, there will be a repeat of the Sketch Engine Workshop on Saturday, July 16 from 9am-12pm in Humanities 135.
Organizers
- Adam Kilgarriff, adam AT lexmasterclass DOT com