A Uniform Interface to Large-Scale Linguistic Resources

In the paper we address two practical problems concerning the use of corpora in translation studies. The first stems from the limited resources available for targeted languages and genres within languages, whereas translation researchers and students need: sufficiently large modern corpora, either reflecting general language or specific to a problem domain. The second problem concerns the lack of a uniform interface for accessing the resources, even when they exist. We deal with the first problem by developing a framework for semiautomatic acquisition of large corpora from the Internet for the languages relevant for our research and training needs. We outline the methodology used and discuss the composition of Internet-derived corpora. We deal with the second problem by developing a uniform interface to our corpora. In addition to standard options for choosing corpora and sorting concordance lines, the interface can compute the list of collocations and filter the results according to user-specified patterns in order to detect language-specific syntactic structures.