Word at a Glance: Modular Word Profile Aggregator

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 7009–7014 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 7009 Word at a Glance: Modular Word Profile Aggregator Tom´aˇs Mach´alek Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Faculty of Arts - Charles University n´am. Jana Palacha 1/2, 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic tomas.machalek@ff.cuni.cz Abstract Word at a Glance (WaG) is a word profile aggregator that provides means for exploring individual words, their comparison and translation, based on existing language resources and related software services. It is designed as a building kit-like application that fetches data from different sources and compiles them into a single, comprehensible and structured web page. WaG can be easily configured to support many tasks, but in general, it is intended to be used not only by language experts but also the general public. Keywords: meta search, word profile, web application, user interface, research portal, language resources promotion 1. Introduction Individual language research centres and other language infrastructures all over the world have already collected a vast amount of diverse, well organized language resources (LRs) for many languages. However, such a diversity of data sets and services can also be overwhelming and hard to navigate through for many users. Our experience in the Czech National Corpus (CNC) shows that it is helpful to point users towards a careful selection of corpora, as well as to offer use cases with appropriate reasoning and inter- pretation of the observed language phenomena. In this paper, we introduce Word at a Glance (WaG) that has been created to address the issue. WaG is a web application that offers a brief profile of a query (typically a single word) that is attractive, user-friendly and easy to understand. It is designed as a set of customizable tiles to showcase relevant characteristics of a given word (or phrase) that can be de- rived from available data and presented to users (visualiza- tions of metadata variations, development trends, colloca- tions, translation equivalents, variation of individual forms in a paradigm based on real data etc.). Several alternative approaches that served as an inspiration for WaG should be mentioned. Most prominently, there is the DWDS online dictionary (Klein and Geyken, 2010) that is very similar but lexically oriented. Another set of ideas comes from English-Corpora.org (Davies, 2008) with its corpus-based overall statistics, as well as Sketch En- gine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) with its collocation profiles. However, these approaches are not directly usable either because the interfaces are tailor-made for particular data or simply because of licensing reasons. In contrast, WaG is an open-source application created with reusability in mind. A typical layout of WaG can be seen in Figure 1, the pro- duction version is available at https://www.korpus. cz/wag/. 2. Basic characteristics WaG is a web application accessible either via a desk- top web browser or a smart mobile device where it adapts Figure 1: An overview of WaG user interface its user interface for mobile-specific input and …

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