The corpus, its users and their needs

Abstract

COMPARA is a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, currently with 3 million words. The corpus was launched in 2000 and at present it is possibly the largest edited parallel corpus publicly available on the Web, with roughly 6,000 corpus queries per month. This paper summarizes an analysis of six years of corpus use. We begin by looking at user studies for language resources, especially corpora, and then we provide a snapshot of COMPARA's users and their behaviour based on log analysis. Particular emphasis is given to the language interface preferred by users (Portuguese and English are possible), the choice between the Simple and Complex Search modes, the reasons underlying null-results and behaviour after truncated output. The data has pointed us to cases where COMPARA's Web interface can be improved, and provided insights about our users and the problems they face, although further studies that distinguish between different kinds of users remain necessary.

Raising teachers' awareness of corpora

“…Some of the difficulties encountered by novice corpus users in general are, however, described by Bernardini (2000), Kennedy & Miceli (2001), Frankenberg-Garcia (2005, Bianchi & Manca (2006) and Santos & Frankenberg-Garcia (2007). Although these studies differ quite substantially from one to another, they all converge to suggest that corpus skills that come as second nature to experts are not at all obvious to the untrained.…”

“…For example, in the same study of log files from the COMPARA corpus (Santos & Frankenberg-Garcia 2007), we found records of queries reflecting serious misconceptions about the kind of information that can be retrieved from a corpus, including queries as absurd as the string this still did not give me the happiness I thought it would or for which I sought. Logs with queries such as water shining, bill quantities and like a manor also suggest that people who are new to corpora have very little idea of the way chunks of words behave.…”

“…In her description of language students exploring corpora for the first time, Bernardini (2000) noted that the students were content to use the full BNC instead of narrowing it down to the specific sub-corpora that were relevant to their particular queries. Paradoxically, in our analysis of the log files of COMPARA -a much smaller, three-million-word parallel corpus of English and Portuguese (Frankenberg-Garcia & Santos 2003) -Diana Santos and I were able to observe that certain users tended to limit their searches to minute sub-corpora that did not return any hits for their queries, although they would have found relevant and useful hits if they had chosen to use less restrictive sub-corpora (Santos & Frankenberg-Garcia 2007).…”

“…For example, in their classroom observations of undergraduates using corpora, Kennedy & Miceli (2001) noted that the students rarely carried out follow-up queries in order to refine their searches. Likewise, when analysing log files from COMPARA to check what happened after a user obtained a null result, we found that in almost half the user sessions we examined, people simply ended the session instead of trying out a modified or an altogether different query (Santos & Frankenberg-Garcia 2007).…”

“…Indeed, an in-depth analysis of 1000 queries returning null results in this corpus shows that only around 20% had actually been plausible queries. Some of the problems identified could be traced back to users applying dictionary and web browsing strategies to corpora, but most of them seemed to reflect a complete failure to grasp the very basics of corpus exploration (Santos & Frankenberg-Garcia 2007).…”