Compiling Specialised Comparable Corpora. Should we always trust (Semi-)automatic Compilation Tools?

Abstract

Decisions at the outset of compiling a comparable corpus are of crucial importance for how the corpus is to be built and analysed later on.

Several variables and external criteria are usually followed when building a corpus but little is been said about textual distributional similarity in this context and the quality that it brings to research. In an attempt to fulfil this gap, this paper aims at presenting a simple but efficient methodology capable of measuring a corpus internal degree of relatedness. To do so, this methodology takes advantage of both available natural language processing technology and statistical methods in a successful attempt to access the relatedness degree between documents. Our findings prove that using a list of common entities and a set of distributional similarity measures is enough not only to describe and assess the degree of relatedness between the documents in a comparable corpus, but also to rank them according to their degree of relatedness within the corpus.