Corpus tools for lexicographers

To analyse corpus data, lexicographers need software that allows them to search, manipulate and save data, a 'corpus tool'. A good corpus tool is the key to a comprehensive lexicographic analysis—a corpus without a good tool to access it is of little use. Both corpus compilation and corpus tools have been swept along by general technological advances over the last three decades. Compiling and storing corpora has become far faster and easier, so corpora tend to be much larger than previous ones. Most of the first COBUILD dictionary was produced from a corpus of eight million words. Several of the leading English dictionaries of the 1990s were produced using the British National Corpus (BNC), of 100 million words. Current lexico-graphic projects we are involved in use corpora of around a billion words—though this is still less than one hundredth of one percent of the English language text available on the Web (see Rundell, this volume). The amount of data to analyse has thus increased significantly, and corpus tools have had to be improved to assist lexicographers in adapting to this change. Corpus tools have become faster, more multifunctional, and customizable. In the COBUILD project, getting concordance output took a long time and then the concordances were printed on paper and handed out to lexicographers (Clear 1987). Today, with Google as a point of comparison, concordancing needs to be instantaneous, with the analysis taking place on the computer screen. Moreover, larger corpora offer much higher numbers of concordance lines per word (especially for high-frequency words), and, considering the time constraints of the lexicographers (see Rundell, this volume), new features of data summarization are required to ease and speed the analysis. In this chapter, we review the functionality of corpus tools used by lexicographers. In Section 3.2, we discuss the procedures in corpus preparation that are required for some of these features to work. In Section 3.3, we briefly describe some leading tools