Automated Construction and Evaluation of Japanese Web-based Reference Corpora

A particularly promising approach to the use of the Web for linguistic research is to build corpora via automated queries to search engines, retrieving and post-processing the pages found in this way (Ghani et al. 2003, Baroni and Bernardini 2004, Sharoff to appear). This approach differs from the traditional method of corpus construction, where one needs to spend considerable time finding and selecting the texts to be included, but has perfect control and awareness over contents. With automated Webbased corpus construction, the situation is reversed: one can build a corpus in very little time, but without a good control over what kinds of texts are in the corpus.