Searching Linguistic Patterns in Large Text Corpora for Digital Humanities Research

This workshop introduces advanced search technologies and tools for the analysis of large corpora and text collections. Patterns play an important role in empirical language investigations. They can be both syntactic and lexical in nature. Searches for specific patterns can help to provide answers to research questions in the fields of linguistics and lexicology (e.g. in matters of language change) as well as in the fields of social sciences (e.g. content analysis, discourse analysis).

The workshop is targeted at students and researchers who plan to include (annotated) corpora in their research design or have already decided to do so. The examples and exercises draw heavily on diachronic - and to a lesser extent contemporary - corpora of the German language. Knowledge of German is therefore helpful but not a precondition for participation in this workshop.

Topics / Programme

• Exploration of user interests and projects
• Introduction to basic concepts
• Strategies and innovative tools for querying diachronic corpora and tree banks
• Collocational patterns, search and classification
• Collocations from a diachronic perspective (DiaCollo)

The format of the workshop will be a combination of lecture-style sessions and hands-on sessions. Participants are encouraged to bring along their research questions and to present them at the outset of the course.