itSkELL – Italian corpus for SkELL

itSkELL: Italian corpus for SkELL

The Italian corpus for SkELL (itSkELL) is an Italian corpus made up of texts collected from the Internet. The texts come from the itTenTen corpus 2016 according to the choice of Egon W. Stemle from Eurac Research. The corpus was specially built up in order to provide the best sentence examples.

SkELL

SkELL is an abbreviation of Sketch Engine for Language Learning. It is a freely available web interface suitable for Italian learning.

Good sentence examples

The corpus consists of only sentences (adjoining sentences does not have to relate to each other) which were sorted according to their text quality. This quality is computed by GDEX system that adds a score to each sentence. The score is mainly based on the sentence length (minimum and maximum length) and a word frequency of particular words which occur in the sentence. The sentences are sorted in the way that the sentences with the highest score are displayed as first results of a concordance.

Part-of-speech tagset

The itSkELL corpus is PoS tagged with the TreeTagger tool using Marco Baroni’s parameter file. The POS tagset description is available here.

Tools to work with the Italian corpus

A complete set of tools is available to work with this Italian corpus to generate:

word sketch – Italian collocations categorized by grammatical relations
thesaurus – synonyms and similar words for every word
word lists – lists of Italian nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. organized by frequency
n-grams – frequency list of multi-word units
concordance – examples in context

Changelog

itSkELL 1.0 (spring 2018)

initial version with 380 million tokens

Bibliography & referencing

SkELL corpus

BAISA, Vít a Vít SUCHOMEL. SkELL – Web Interface for English Language Learning. In Eighth Workshop on Recent Advances in Slavonic Natural Language Processing. Brno: Tribun EU, 2014, pp. 63-70. ISSN 2336-4289.

References to SkELL and versioning

From time to time, the underlying corpus data may change (cleaning, refining etc.). To refer to particular results (using bookmarked URLs for example), also refer to a particular version. The web interface may also change occasionally. Each SkELL page carries a version via link “Terms” in the left corner at the bottom, e.g. VERSION1-VERSION2. This refers to the version of the interface and the version of the corpus data respectively.