The Word Sketch Engine (WSE, also known as the Sketch Engine) is a new Corpus Query System, presented by the Lexical Computing Ltd, which incorporates word sketches, grammatical relations, and a distributional thesaurus. A word sketch is a one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour.
The WSE is designed for anyone wanting to research how words behave, with particular regard to the needs of lexicography. It has been used in the preparation of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002, Edited by Michael Rundell), in the development of the new edition of the Oxford Thesaurus of English (2004, Edited by Maurice Waite), and is in use for lexicography at Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
The system can be used for corpora of any language including Chinese. It has been loaded with various corpora of up to a billion words, of various languages. The tool offers a grammatically informed analysis of the data, giving a "word sketch" for each word. A word sketch gives, for verbs, the salient subjects, objects, modifiers; for nouns, the verbs it is subject and object of, modifying nouns and adjectives, etc.
Users can apply for a free trial account at the WSE website
http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/
which allows them to to examine the software and conduct research using sample corpora including the BNC for English. The LDC's Chinese Gigaword corpus will also be included for trial access shortly.
The WSE is designed for anyone wanting to research how words behave, with particular regard to the needs of lexicography. It has been used in the preparation of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002, Edited by Michael Rundell), in the development of the new edition of the Oxford Thesaurus of English (2004, Edited by Maurice Waite), and is in use for lexicography at Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
The system can be used for corpora of any language including Chinese. It has been loaded with various corpora of up to a billion words, of various languages. The tool offers a grammatically informed analysis of the data, giving a "word sketch" for each word. A word sketch gives, for verbs, the salient subjects, objects, modifiers; for nouns, the verbs it is subject and object of, modifying nouns and adjectives, etc.
Users can apply for a free trial account at the WSE website
http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/
which allows them to to examine the software and conduct research using sample corpora including the BNC for English. The LDC's Chinese Gigaword corpus will also be included for trial access shortly.