The Minho Quotation Resource

Direct quotations from business leaders can provide a rich sample of language which is in common use in the world of commerce. This language used by business leaders often uses: metaphors, euphemisms, slang, obscenities and invented words. In addition the business lexicon is dynamic because new words or terms will gain popularity with businessmen whilst obsolete words will exit their common vocabulary. In addition to being a rich source of language direct quotations from business leaders can have ”real world” consequences. For example, Gerald Ratner nearly bankrupted his company with an infamous candid comment at an Institute of Directors meeting in 1993. Currently, there is no ”direct quotations from business leaders” resource freely available to the research community. The ”Minho Quotation Resource” (MQR) captures the business lexicon with in excess of 500,000 quotations from individuals from the business world. The quotations were captured from October 2009 and April 2011. In this article we describe the MQR corpus and its main characteristics as well as few example experiments. The resource is available in a searchable Lucene index and will be available for download in May 2012.