Item Details

Using Grammatical Features for Automatic Register Identification in an Unrestricted Corpus of Documents from the Open Web

Issue: Vol 2 No. 1 (2015)

Journal: Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science

Subject Areas: Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/jrds.v2i1.27637

Abstract:

Most previous attempts at automatic genre identification have been based on corpus samples that are relatively small and artificially restricted. In this study we set out to automatically predict register/genre categories in a large, representative sample of documents from the open web using a linguistic approach focused on lexico-grammatical characteristics that have functional associations. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of automatically predicting register/genre on the unrestricted open web, and we anticipate that future extensions will allow this task to be accomplished with considerably higher degrees of accuracy.

Author: Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert

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