Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

1Linguistic Resources for NLP

Today, the use of good linguistic resources for the development of NLP systems seems indispensable. These resources are essential for creating grammars, in the framework of symbolic approaches or to carry out the training of modules based on machine learning. However, collecting, transcribing, annotating and analyzing these resources is far from being trivial. This is why it seems sensible for us to approach these questions in an introduction to NLP. To find out more about the matter of linguistic data and corpus linguistics, a number of works and articles can be consulted, including [HAB 97, MEY 04, WIL 06a, WIL 06b] and [MEG 03].

1.1. The concept of a corpus

At this point, a definition of the term corpus is necessary, given that it is central for the subject of this section. It is important to note that research works related to both written and spoken language data is not limited to corpus linguistics. It is actually possible to use individual texts for various forms of literary, linguistic and stylistic analyses. In Latin, the word corpus means body, but when used as a source of data in linguistics, it can be interpreted as a collection of texts. To be more specific, we will quote scholarly definitions of the term corpus from the point of view of modern linguistics:

1. – A collection of linguistic data, either written texts or a transcription of recorded speech, which can be used as a starting point of linguistic description or as a means of ...