Dougal Graham – [email protected]

17
How I Learned to Stop Empiricising and Love my Intuitions Or: Why corpus research is like a tornado DOUGAL GRAHAM – [email protected]

description

How I Learned to Stop Empiricising and Love my Intuitions Or: Why corpus research is like a tornado. Dougal Graham – [email protected]. Me & My Research. Computational background Academic Formulas List (Simpson- Vlach , et al, 2010) AFL for Engineering English. Q. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Transcript of Dougal Graham – [email protected]

Page 1: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

How I Learned to Stop Empiricising and Love my IntuitionsOr: Why corpus research is like a tornadoDOUGAL GRAHAM – [email protected]

Page 2: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Me & My Researcho Computational background

o Academic Formulas List (Simpson-Vlach, et al, 2010)

o AFL for Engineering English

Page 3: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Q1. In which genre (spoken, fiction, newspaper, academic) is

shall used most and in which the least, compared to will?

2. Put the following verbs in order of frequency (high to low): promise, shine, finish, enable, jump.

3. Which of the following would occur more frequently with little, and which with small: success, plate, hill, baby, impact, pieces, wonder, distance.

(Davies, 2011)

Page 4: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Empirical approacheso Phrase research: “as shown in chapter”o Phrase list plus…o Empirical metrics:o Frequencyo Rangeo Mutual Informationo LLo FTW (Simpson-Vlach et al, 2010)

Page 5: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

ResultsThree Words Four Words Five Words

what is the can be used to at a rate of #the number of as a function of you should be able toas shown in the magnitude of the beyond the scope of this# and # as shown in figure how long will it take

can be used with respect to the the first law of thermodynamics

shown in figure in this chapter we in such a way thatthe value of the value of the the rate of change of

Page 6: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Intuitively…o Results not so usefulo Goal: “A useful list of formulaic Eng. phrases”o Re-visit metricso Frequencyo Rangeo Mutual Informationo LLo FTW (Simpson-Vlach et al, 2010)

Page 7: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Re-evaluationo Intuitively, the results weren’t useful

o Confusion

o Martinez & Schmitt’s PHRASE Listo Intuitive criteria

Page 8: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Problemso AFL approacho results not sufficiently usefulo are the assumptions warranted?

o PHRASE List approacho Criteria very intuitiveo Hand-sorting 15,000 items

Page 9: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Liking my intuitionso Needs to be useful for learners

o Should be difficult language

o How can we determine the language that will be difficult?

Page 10: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

ResultsThree Words Four Words Five Words

what is the can be used to at a rate of #the number of as a function of you should be able toas shown in the magnitude of the beyond the scope of this# and # as shown in figure how long will it take

can be used with respect to the the first law of thermodynamics

shown in figure in this chapter we in such a way thatthe value of the value of the the rate of change of

Page 11: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Semi-empiricalo marked part of speech

“for a given”o marked word form

“is known as”o marked collocations

“under the action of”

Page 12: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Semi-Intuitiveo non-prototypical word meaning

“let us consider”o non-literal phrase meaning

“we can write”o specialized syntax

“let X be”

Page 13: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

1. Empiricism

2. Intuitive re-evaluation

3. Semi-empirical criteria

4. Semi-intuitive criteria

5. Results

Intuition Empiricism

Page 14: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Embrace the tornado

Page 15: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th
Page 16: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Final Points

o Embrace the tornado

o Iterative design

o Precision vs. Recall

Page 17: Dougal  Graham – dougal.gra@kmutt.ac.th

Selected References Davies, M. (2011). Synchronic and diachronic use of corpora. In V. Viana, S. Zyngier, & G. Barnbrook (Eds.), Perspectives on corpus linguistics (Vol. 48, pp. 63–80). John Benjamins Publishing.

Martinez, R., & Schmitt, N. (2012). A Phrasal Expressions List. Applied Linguistics, 33(3), 299–320.

Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, N. C. (2010). An Academic Formulas List: New Methods in Phraseology Research. Applied Linguistics, 31(4), 487–512. doi:10.1093/applin/amp058