[Corpora-List] Uses of N-grams?

[Krishnamurthy, Ramesh]

apologies for hitting 'send' before inserting the 'subject' heading! :(



________________________________
From: Krishnamurthy, Ramesh
Sent: 18 July 2013 17:01
To: cedric.krummes at uni-leipzig.de
Cc: corpora at uib.no
Subject:


Hi Cedric



As we cannot be sure of the meaning or the part-of-speech of an item

from a word frequency list, are not n-grams a sort of halfway house

between word frequency lists and concordances?



To me, n-grams is just one of the tools in the corpus linguistics toolbag,

although it may be a relative newcomer, and hasn't grabbed the headlines

like keywords, perhaps.



If I remember correctly, at Cobuild, we first used bigrams for the BBC

dictionary (published in 1992). I don't think n-grams was a feature of

the earlier versions of WordSmith, and even in the more recent

AntConc, the n-grams option is slightly hidden.



Since the 1990s, I have used n-grams as a routine part of corpus

analysis, if they are available in the software I am using at the time,

for a variety of purposes (eg investigating language varieties in 'The

Globalization of Business English?' at Complex 2001; investigating

genre features in 'A corpus-based analysis of junk emails' at LREC

2002; and recently, to compare Business Spanish and Business French

in research for the COMENEGO project).



Access to Google n-grams seems to have sparked interest in studies

into historical changes in social, cultural, and political values?





best

Ramesh

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:51:30 +0200
From: Cedric Krummes <cedric.krummes at uni-leipzig.de>
Subject: [Corpora-List] Uses of N-grams?
To: Corpora at uib.no

Hello,

Regarding n-grams (highly frequent word sequences like "on the other
hand" or "why don't you"), does anybody any uses for them apart from
language teaching.

Most literature dealing with n-grams seems to apply them to foreign
language teaching, second language acquisition, or English for X
purposes. Any other uses?

Best wishes,

Cédric Krummes
--
Dr. Cédric Krummes

Universität Leipzig · +49-341-97-37404
http://www.cedrickrummes.org/contact.php


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