Seminar on corpus analysis

Last weekend (September 14th–15th), I went with Prof. Yoshii, our department chair, to Tokyo to attend a seminar by Atsushi Mizumoto, quite a famous professor from Kansai University. The seminar was a 12-hour course on corpus analysis, most of it featuring hands-on work using a computer to learn the computer languages R and Python.

Corpora (the plural form of “corpus”) are used by people who make dictionaries or grammar books to find out how language is actually used. They are just large collections of texts that can be analyzed by computers. Most example sentences in dictionaries these days are from corpora. Teachers can also make their own corpora, for example of students’ essays to see what kinds of errors they make. And students can also use corpora to find out how a word or grammar pattern is used.

It was a very interesting seminar. And it was held at Temple University Japan‘s new mini-campus, located on the campus of Showa Women’s University.