24.1694, FYI: New Corpus: GloWbE 1.9 Billion Words, 20 Countries

Tue Apr 16 15:05:37 UTC 2013

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1694. Tue Apr 16 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.1694, FYI: New Corpus: GloWbE 1.9 Billion Words, 20 Countries

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Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:05:33
From: Mark Davies [mark_davies at byu.edu]
Subject: New Corpus: GloWbE 1.9 Billion Words, 20 Countries

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We have just released a new corpus at corpus.byu.edu, which may be of interest
to some of you:

GloWbE: Corpus of Global Web-Based English
http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/

This new corpus is 1.9 billion words in size, and is based on 1.8 million web
pages (including blogs) from 20 different English-speaking countries (US, UK,
NZ, India, Hong Kong, etc). GloWbE is 4-5 times as large as COCA, and about 20
times as big as the BNC, and thus yields much richer data for some
low-frequency constructions.

The real power of GloWbE, though, is the ability to see the frequency of any
word, phrase, or grammatical construction in each of the 20 different
countries. You can also compare any features in two sets of dialects, such as
British and American English (in more than 775 million words of text for just
these two dialects). Or you could just limit your search to one or two
countries (e.g. Australia (148 million words), South Africa (45 million), or
Singapore (43 million)), and you'll still be searching the largest online
corpus for most of these twenty countries.

This new corpus of World English adds nicely to the other corpora from
corpus.byu.edu, which allow you to examine variation in English in ways that
are perhaps not possible with other corpora (see
http://corpus.byu.edu/variation.asp):

-- historical: COHA, TIME, COCA (recent change), Google Books (Advanced)
-- genres: COCA and BYU-BNC
-- dialects: GloWbE, and side-by-side comparisons of corpora

Mark Davies
Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University
http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/
Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases
Historical linguistics // Language variation
English, Spanish, and Portuguese

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Lexicography
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

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