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<TITLE>RE: [Corpora-List] ACL proceedings paper in the American National Corpus</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>There is clearly an issue here regarding what the American National Corpus is trying to represent. The Brown Corpus tried to be "representative" by extracting equal-sized samples selected from all the publications of a given year. As has been found, it failed to adequately determine that all the texts were created by American authors and alas, 1 million words we now know to be quite small (adequate only for a Pocket Dictionary worth of entries). Collegiate dictionaries require at least a 10 million word corpus, and Unabridged dictionaries at least 100 million words (the target of the ANC).</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>However, what I detect to this point from ANC literature is that they are first trying to fill the quota of 100 million words and only secondarily concerned about "balancing" the corpus for genre and sample sizes. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Also, if I'm not mistaken, the Brown corpus didn't JUST balance for genres, it tried to balance for timespan. I.e., it tried to form a closed universe of possible publications and then representatively sample from that universe. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>This involves attempting to determine all the possible publications in that universe and then selecting a subset which represents them in both quantity and genre. While it may seem ambitious to first decide what is in the list of all available publications (especially, if your criterion for inclusion is merely "published after 1990"), it may be the only way to have a universe from which a truly random sample can be extracted.</FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2>Note: Brown Corpus Manual <A HREF="http://www.hit.uib.no/icame/brown/bcm.html" TARGET="_blank">http://www.hit.uib.no/icame/brown/bcm.html</A></FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Robert A. Amsler</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>robert.amsler@hq.doe.gov</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2>(301) 903-8823</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2> </FONT>
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