Web corpora are a cornerstone of modern Language Technology. Corpora built from the web are convenient because their creation is fast and inexpensive. Several studies have been carried out to assess the representativeness of general-purpose web corpora by comparing them to traditional corpora. Less attention has been paid to assess the representativeness of specialized or domain-specific web corpora. In this paper, we focus on the assessment of domain representativeness of web corpora and we claim that it is possible to assess the degree of domain-specificity, or domainhood, of web corpora. We present a case study where we explore the effectiveness of different measures -namely the Mann-Withney-Wilcoxon Test, Kendall correlation coefficient, Kullback-Leibler divergence, log-likelihood and burstiness -to gauge domainhood. Our findings indicate that burstiness is the most suitable measure to single out domain-specific words from a specialized corpus and to allow for the quantification of domainhood.

In the era of data-driven science, corpus-based language technology is an essential part of cyber physical systems. In this chapter, the authors describe the design and the development of an extensible domain-specific web corpus to be used in a distributed social application for the care of the elderly at home. The domain of interest is the medical field of chronic diseases. The corpus is conceived as a flexible and extensible textual resource, where additional documents and additional languages will be appended over time. The main purpose of the corpus is to be used for building and training language technology applications for the “layfication” of the specialized medical jargon. “Layfication” refers to the automatic identification of more intuitive linguistic expressions that can help laypeople (e.g., patients, family caregivers, and home care aides) understand medical terms, which often appear opaque. Exploratory experiments are presented and discussed.