What is Bwana Net?

BwanaNet is an interface developed at the IULA that allows to query the Technical Corpus(CT) of the Institut via Internet. The CT is indexed using the Corpus Workbench, a set of tools developed at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung of the Stuttgart University.

With BwanaNet people can consult the CT-IULA documents. These are the steps to follow:

1. Select the language document.
2. Select if you want to do a monolingual or a multilingual consult.
3. Select the documents
4. Define the kind of consult
5. Define the consult
6. Visualize the results

One of the good points of this site is that you can choose the domain and the sub domains, in order to have a more specific and close search.

The problem with this corpus, and one of the main differences between this and Cluvi is that one you search what you have chosen the results are quite different.

How can they be improved?

Analysing the side and at the first sight we have realised that the Bwananet side first page hasn’t got clear instructions for the searching. We have a brief description in the main page of what is it based on and the history of the creation.It offers a link to the IULA that describes the project of the corpus while at the first sight of the CLUVI site we can see a more clear presentation of what they offer and a description of all the kind of translations that the user can try.

Bwananet offers the possibility of visiting its page through three languages : English, Spanish and Catalán. CLUVI offers only two: Galego and English; both Corpus offer very few resources in what is referred to language a very few amount of people are able to use it because of the language.Both of them offer a description of the project and the searches you can do and find. CLUVI has got a better and clear description of the information and the way to use it.

CLUVI offers a clear and listed description of all the different languages and translations that can be used while the Bwananet site does not make a very deep description of the possibilities that offers.

Both CLUVI and Bwana Net offer good results; they offer different languages, different kinds of texts (original, translated, legal, literary, etc.). While CLUVI is easier, Bwana Net is more specific.

A brief comparison:

At the end of the researching what we find is that both sites are quite different one from the other. Let’s see some common aspects:

- They both offer multilingual searching.

- They both offer specific research in very specific areas and contexts.

Let’s see now some differences:

- Bwana Net requires more time and a more specific knowledge and searching.

- Cluvi offers more information about the context and the place the information is taken from.

- Bwana Net is much more specific than Cluvi. They offer a closer research and more options than Cluvi.

Bibliography:

Our Group’s Project
Bwana Net
CLUVI

From the United Kingdom:

BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

The website present the site as: “The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written”. There are two parts: the written one, that covers the 90%, and the spoken one, that covers the 10% of the whole website. While the written part includes extracts of regional and national newspapers, magazines and so on, the spoken one consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations. The BNC is monolingual, synchronic, general and sample.

ASK OXFORD

The Ask Oxfor corpus was created by the owners, or makers, of the Oxford University Press and Ocford English Dictionary. As they themselves explain in their site: “The Oxford English Corpus is central to the process and to Oxford’s £35 million research programme – the largest language research programme in the world”. It also contains two billion words from literary resources and they give all kinds of information in the documents: genre, author, publication, and so on. A quite complete corpus we may say.

COLLINS

Collins WordbanksOnline is an online Internet service for accessing language data based on the Collins corpora of modern, written and spoken text. There are a lot of things you can do: access examples of vocabulary and grammar, check concordances; prepare handouts, worksheets, linguistic analyses; check idioms and problems of every kind (grammar, vocabulary, false friends, etc.), synonims, variants between the British English and the American English.

From the USA:

American National Corpus

The site describes itself as: “The American National Corpus (ANC) project is creating a massive electronic collection of American English, including texts of all genres and transcripts of spoken data produced from 1990 onward”. Of course, and as we can image, it is related to American English, since we know that British and American English are quite different, not only because of pronunciation or lexicon (among other things) but also because of the culture surrounding the language. This site is not as complete as the British one, because it is only on its beginnings, but surely it will developed as much as the British one.

Well, there are much more corpora that we could analyse in here, but I just wanted to show some of the most important ones, as they can be the ones that we can use in the future, since we are supposed to be English Philologists as soon as we finish our studies.

Bibliography:

BNC (accessed June 22, 2008 )
Ask Oxford (accessed June 22, 2008 )
Collins (accessed June 22, 2008 )
American National Corpus (accessed June 22, 2008 )

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. It has more than three million users and 100 million bookmarked URLs.

After posting the link, the site will require you some information about that link. The description of the site (the name of it), and what is more important, tags, also known as folksonomy. Each link will have its own tags in order to, afterwards, save them in specific bundles and have a quick entrance and search of the links. Del.icio.us also has a hotlist that on the home page, as well as a “popular” and “recent” link pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of internet memes and trends.

The use of this site is absolutely free and its development has grown hugely. If you want to save your links you just have to link them on del.icio.us and there you have them. Apart from that this site also offers the possibility to see other’s peoples links and the related links that may interest you when you post one. This is it, you could see, after saving a site, other sites that may interest you, that are similar to the one you have just posted. This occurs because of the folksonmy-tags tool, which as you can see is useful and quick.

Problems of too many bookmarks saved on your computer are solved: del.icio.us is there for us, giving a service that is quite useful because you can save your link and because you can find so many interesting pages as I have found myself. We have been using it for our lessons, but I’ll continue using it afterwards because it has so many good point and all the bookmarks I am interest in are there, saved and ready to be seen.
 

Bibliography:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us 

(Last retrieved, 22nd June 2008, at 11:51)

What is CLUVI?

The CLUVI (Linguistic Corpus of the University of Vigo) is an open set of parallel textual corpora of specialized registers of contemporary Galician language developed by the SLI (Computational Linguistics Group of the University of Vigo) and publicly available in its website since September 2003. The CLUVI Corpus contains over 22 million words, and its main components are the TECTRA Corpus of English-Galician literary texts, the FEGA Corpus of French-Galician literary texts, the LEGA Corpus of Galician-Spanish legal texts, the UNESCO Corpus of English-Galician-French-Spanish scientific-technical divulgation texts, the LOGALIZA Corpus of English-Galician software localization, and the CONSUMER Corpus of Spanish-Galician-Catalan-Basque consumer information.

What is CLUVI used for or which tools can we find in it?

This web application permits both simple and very complex searches of isolated words or sequences of words, and shows the multilingual equivalences of the terms in context, as found in real and referenced translations. The terms searched can correspond to either of the languages of the translation, but it is also possible to carry out true multilingual searches, that is, to simultaneously search one term from each of the languages of translation. The number of aligned works and language pairs available in the website increases regularly, since the CLUVI is a academic research project in progress and with great vitality. At the moment, the CLUVI Parallel Corpus webpage permits to search five major corpora -TECTRA, FEGA, LEGA, UNESCO and LOGALIZA-, as well as other minor parallel corpora now in progress. It should be pointed out that the CLUVI interface also permits to browse the TURIGAL Corpus of Portuguese-English tourism texts, and the Legebiduna Corpus of Basque-Spanish administrative texts developed by the DELi group at the U. of Deusto.

Besides this, CLUVI offers a large amount of on-line documents and research projects about the CLUVI Corpus at SLI (Computational Linguistics Group).

CLUVI’s main sections:

* LEGA Corpus of Galician-Spanish legal texts (6.329.655 words) [Search] [Composition]
* UNESCO Corpus of English-Galician-French-Spanish scientific-technical divulgation (3.724.620 words) [Search] [Composition]
* LOGALIZA Corpus of English-Galician software localization (2.375.157 words) [Search] [Composition]
* TECTRA Corpus of English-Galician literary texts
* FEGA Corpus of French-Galician literary texts
* CONSUMER Corpus of Spanish-Galician-Catalan-Basque consumer information
* LEGE-BI Corpus of Basque-Spanish legal texts
* TURIGAL Corpus of Portuguese-English tourism texts

Apart from these, CLUVI has more sections in progress.

Great site to begin with the Corpus issue.

Bibliography:

CLUVI

(Last visited April 29th. )

The word “corpus“, derived from the Latin word meaning “body”, may be used to refer to any text in written or spoken form. However, in modern Linguistics this term is used to refer to large collections of texts which represent a sample of a particular variety or use of language(s) that are presented in machine readable form.

Computer-readable corpora can consist of raw text only, i.e. plain text with no additional information. Many corpora have been provided with some kind of linguistic information, here called mark-up.

Types of corpora

There are many different kinds of corpora. They can contain written or spoken (transcribed) language, modern or old texts, texts from one language or several languages. The texts can be whole books, newspapers, journals, speeches etc, or consist of extracts of varying length. The kind of texts included and the combination of different texts vary between different corpora and corpus types.

‘General corpora’ consist of general texts, texts that do not belong to a single text type, subject field, or register. An example of a general corpus is the British National Corpus. Some corpora contain texts that are sampled (chosen from) a particular variety of a language, for example, from a particular dialect or from a particular subject area. These corpora are sometimes called ‘Sublanguage Corpora’.

Corpora can consist of texts in one language (or language variety) only or of texts in more than one language. If the texts are the same in all languages, e.i. translations, the corpus is called a Parallel Corpus. A Comparable Corpus is a collection of “similar” text.

FUENTE: What is a Corpus?

• all the possible search they offer

• which results they offer

• how they can be improved

• their history, when they were created, for what goal, who were the creators

• how we can compare them with similar sites: if it is better, worse, what they offer, if they offer more or less, the tools, etc.

We can be using pages like this one:

Cluvi

But, what does Language Resources refer to?

It is not an esay term. We can understand Language Resources as the set of speech or language data in descriptions in machine readable form. What does it mean? That it only works via machines, i.e. computers. Maybe, with examples, we can understand it better. Some of these Language/Linguistic Resources are: 

• Written and spoken corpora.
• Computational Lexicons.
• Terminology Databases.
• Speech Collection and Processing.

For these language resources, is important to have basic software tools, because from them some more actions and developments will take place in the Language Resources.

And, which is the mission of ELRA?

ELRA wants to promote the Language Resources for the Human Language Technology sector and at the same time evaluate language engineering technologies. Between the services that they offer, are: identification, production, promotion, validation, distribution and standardisation.

At the same time, ELRA provides support for the infrastructure and also scientific field of language resources support. They also conduct, sometimes, market studies and surveys about HLT. They participate actively in the development of HLT.
 

Estas son algunas de sus características:

Búsqueda de blogs y canales RSS en un solo buscador, suscripciones online, lector de noticias, publicación de blogs y herramientas para compartir información

Disponible en 10 idiomas

Previsiones meteorológicas personalizadas

Marcador para suscribirse a cualquier fuente con un solo clic

Notificadores para todos los navegadores que le informan de la llegada de nuevos artículos

La listas de los Más Populares muestran los temas del día y los blogs que están recibiendo la mayor atención

Otra de las nuevas herramientas de Internet que surgen para facilitar y para interactuar, así como poner en contacto a personas que en un principio, y sin estas utilidades y herramientas, no tendrían manera de contactar o de relacionarse, así como de disponer de búsquedas de blogs (Technorati es otra de las herramientas) o de canales RSS. Quizás sea un exceso en ciertas cosas pero sin duda alguna, si existe, es porque el público y los usuarios lo requieren. Útil para aquellos que lo quieran y necesiten.

¿Qué es el Google Scholar?

Google Scholar es una herramienta que ha creado Google a través de la cual puedes buscar trabajos académicos. Está dirigido al público que necesite encontrar ayuda en temas relacionados con trabajos, tesis o cualquier producción de utilidad. Es una herramienta dirigida a dar una información especializada, con fuentes fiables que satisface las necesidades de cierto sector social que necesita de estas herramientas útiles, rápidas y eficaces.

En su página web Google Académico ellos mismos se definen como:

Google Académico te permite buscar bibliografía especializada de una manera sencilla. Desde un solo sitio podrás realizar búsquedas en un gran número disciplinas y fuentes como, por ejemplo, estudios revisados por especialistas, tesis, libros, resúmenes y artículos de fuentes como editoriales académicas, sociedades profesionales, depósitos de impresiones preliminares, universidades y otras organizaciones académicas. Google Académico te ayuda a encontrar el material más relevante dentro del mundo de la investigación académica.

Estas son algunas de sus características:

• Buscar en diversas fuentes desde un solo sitio
• Encontrar documentos académicos, resúmenes y citas
• Localizar documentos académicos completos a través de tu biblioteca o en la red
• Obtener información acerca de documentos académicos clave en un campo de investigación

Por lo que puede observarse Google Scholar parece ser una herramienta de gran utilidad: facilita la búsqueda, con resultados rápidos y eficaces, además de fiables. Parece ser que todo aquello que Google crea se convierte en oro y seguro que dentro de poco será una de las herramientas más utilizadas en Internet.