How Specialized are Specialized Corpora? Behavioral Evaluation of Corpus Representativeness for Maltese.

Jerid Francom, Amy LaCross, Adam Ussishkin

Abstract
In this paper we bring to light a novel intersection between corpus linguistics and behavioral data that can be employed as an evaluation metric for resources for low-density languages, drawing on well-established psycholinguistic factors. Using the low-density language Maltese as a test case, we highlight the challenges that face researchers developing resources for languages with sparsely available data and identify a key empirical link between corpus and psycholinguistic research as a tool to evaluate corpus resources. Specifically, we compare two robust variables identified in the psycholinguistic literature: word frequency (as measured in a corpus) and word familiarity (as measured in a rating task). We then apply statistical methods to evaluate the extent to which familiarity ratings predict corpus frequency for verbs in the Maltese corpus from three angles: 1) token frequency, 2) frequency distributions and 3) morpho-syntactic type (binyan). This research provides a multidisciplinary approach to corpus development and evaluation, in particular for less-resourced languages that lack a wide access to diverse language data.
Anthology ID:
L10-1454
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/666_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jerid Francom, Amy LaCross, and Adam Ussishkin. 2010. How Specialized are Specialized Corpora? Behavioral Evaluation of Corpus Representativeness for Maltese.. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
How Specialized are Specialized Corpora? Behavioral Evaluation of Corpus Representativeness for Maltese. (Francom et al., LREC 2010)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/666_Paper.pdf
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