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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

50 years of the Brown corpus: from Kucera & Francis 1967 to advanced LNRE models

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This talk proposes an epistemological survey of corpus linguistics from the early days of the Brown corpus to text mining, not to say data science. The case study in point is the investigation of the Brown corpus, analysed in terms of lexical frequencies in Kucera and Francis 1967 pioneering study. The 50th anniversary of this publication is a good opportunity to discuss the evolution of quantitative linguistics (Lebart & Salem 1988, Oostdijk 1991, Moisl 2015). The first section will retrace the various annotations and twin corpora triggered by the completion of the Brown corpus, and its linguistic exploitations. Comparisons will be made with the corpus-based description of English (Biber et al 1999). This grammar was heralded as the ‘English grammar of the 21st century’. Section 2 will show how LNRE (large Number of Rare Events) models (Baayen 2001, Baroni & Evert 2007, Baayen 2008) have led to reconsider the lexical inventories and the frequency lists in Kucera & Francis 1967. Section 3 will expand on the role of linguistic software in this conjoncture described by Sylvain Auroux as the third revolution of grammatisation (the first one being the invention of writing as a technology, the second being the compiling of grammars and dictionaries, see Auroux 1994). The potential role of R as a software suite in this third technological revolution will be discussed, especially the modelling of vocabulary growth curves implemented in the zipfR package (Evert & Baroni 2007). References AUROUX, Sylvain. 1994. La Révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège : Mardaga. BAAYEN, Harald. 2001.Word Frequency Distributions. Dordrecht, Kluwer. BAAYEN, Harald. 2008. Analysing Linguistic Data wih R. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. BIBER, Douglas & al. 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman. EVERT, Stefan & BARONI, Marco. 2007. “ZipfR: Word frequency distributions in R”, in Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Posters and Demonstrations Session. Prague. GUIRAUD, Pierre. 1960. Problèmes et méthodes de la statistique linguistique. Paris : Presses universitaires de France. KUCERA, H. & Francis, W.N. 1967. Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence: Brown University Press. LEBART, Ludovic & SALEM, André. 1988. Analyse statistique des données textuelles. Paris: Dunod. MOISL, Hermann. 2015. Cluster Analysis for Corpus Linguistics: a approach. Berlin: Mouton. OOSTDIJK, N. 1991. Corpus linguistics and the automatic analysis of English. Rodopi.
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hal-03954901 , version 1 (24-01-2023)

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Nicolas Ballier. 50 years of the Brown corpus: from Kucera & Francis 1967 to advanced LNRE models. ICHOLS XXIV The Fourteenth International Conference On The History of The Language Sciences, ICHOLS, Aug 2017, Paris, France. ⟨hal-03954901⟩
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