New perspectives on corpus linguistics

Abstract

Corpus linguistics has developed a battery of sophisticated linguistic and statistical techniques as the basis for an empirical approach to language study. This paper argues that these techniques may be applicable to other areas such as knowledge discovery in text. This paper firstly describes how corpus linguistics works and, secondly, discusses new perspectives on corpus linguistics in relation to the areas of knowledge discovery in text, terminology extraction and ontology building. Most explicit knowledge is written down in text. This seemingly obvious observation means that most explicit knowledge (and, perhaps, novel implicit knowledge) is to be found in collections of texts or corpora.