Labels: automation

Adam Kilgarriff

Kivik 2013 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 2

Which words are:

Most distinctive of business English? Keywords, already shown

Most often passive?

Kivik 2013 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 3

Common issue for lexicographers

Ordinary cases No need to say anything in dictionary

Extreme cases (“most X”) Needs saying

Kivik 2013 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 4

Not hard in principle

Given the right corpus For each word

Count, under condition 1 Eg plural instances

Count, under condition 2 Eg all instances

Compute ratio Sort all words according to ratio Words at top of list are most X

Kivik 2013 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 5

In practice

Programming task Big corpora: big and slow Slightly different each time Very rarely done

(except Keywords in WordSmith)

Now: in Sketch Engine

Kivik 2013 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 6

FindX specification file

=passive

nameHR passives

human-readable name (optional)WS passive

use the word sketch relation ‘passive’RE -v$

only for items matching this RegExp (here: only verbs) (optional)

Kivik 2013 Kilgarriff / Labels: automation 7

Percentil Ratio Lempos Freq0.2 75.1 base-v 192010.2 74.1 station-v 5570.3 73.0 destine-v 7710.4 70.3 poise-v 6400.4 69.6 doom-v 5200.6 67.2 situate-v 20250.6 66.9 schedule-v 16020.7 66.5 associate-v 80940.7 66.4 entitle-v 26690.8 65.4 embed-v 6880.8 65.2 couple-v 14211.4 59.3 jail-v 9601.5 58.2 deem-v 16261.5 57.2 arm-v 11951.6 56.9 design-v 116621.8 56.2 clothe-v 7491.8 55.9 flank-v 5511.8 55.8 confine-v 26631.9 55.5 dedicate-v 12912.0 54.4 compose-v 23912.0 54.3 convict-v 12982.2 53.2 ally-v 5552.3 52.9 age-v 20202.4 52.5 attach-v 48402.4 52.0 gear-v 7332.5 51.7 levy-v 6032.7 51.2 elect-v 51353.0 50.3 found-v 29013.0 50.3 award-v 3103

Find X