A Lexical Tool for Academic Writing in Spanish based on Expert and Novice Corpora

A Lexical Tool for Academic Writing in Spanish based on Expert and Novice Corpora Marcos García Salido, Marcos Garcia, Milka Villayandre, Margarita Alonso-Ramos Universidade da Coruña, Universidad de León Facultade de Filoloxía, Rúa Lisboa 7, Campus da Zapateira, 15008 A Coruña, Spain Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Campus de Vegazana s/n, 24071 León, Spain {marcos.garcias, marcos.garcia.gonzalez, margarita.alonso}@udc.gal milka.villayandre@unileon.es Abstract The object of this article is to describe the extraction of data from a corpus of academic texts in Spanish and the use of those data for developing a lexical tool oriented to the production of academic texts. The corpus provides the lexical combinations that will be included in the afore-mentioned tool, namely collocations, idioms and formulas. They have been retrieved from the corpus controlling for their keyness (i.e., their specificity with regard to academic texts) and their even distribution across the corpus. For the extraction of collocations containing academic vocabulary other methods have been used, taking advantage of the morphological and syntactic information with which the corpus has been enriched. In the case of collocations and other multiword units, several association measures are being tested in order to restrict the list of candidates the lexicographers will have to deal with manually. Keywords: academic writing, corpus, writing aid, multi-word units, collocations 1. Introduction One of the challenges faced by university students is pro- ducing texts written following the conventions of academic discourse. Writers of English, Dutch or French – to cite a few European languages – have at their disposal sev- eral production-oriented tools (Kübler and Pecman, 2012; D’Hertefelt et al., 2014; Granger and Paquot, 2015). Writ- ers of Spanish can find several guidelines dealing mostly with structural features of academic texts, but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no resource (on paper or in elec- tronic format) where they can search for lexical combina- tions in order to compose academic texts. This paper presents a tool oriented to the production of academic texts in Spanish – the Herramienta de Ayuda a la Redacción de textos Académicos, henceforth, HARTA – based on a corpus of academic texts. This tool will mainly provide indications as to how to use vocabulary typical of the academic genre in order to build complete texts. More particularly, the tool will focus on academic lexical combi- nations (ALCs). By ALCs we mean recurrent sequences of words that may or may not be semantically compositional and fulfill rhetorical functions such as giving examples, in- troducing conclusions, expressing certainty or probability, etc. Three types of ALCs will form the dictionary module: col- locations, idioms and formulas. The ACLs occurring in the corpus will be classified into these three categories and treated accordingly in the tool, following the criteria pro- posed by Mel’ˇcuk (2015) within the framework of Explana- tory and Combinatorial Lexicology. Idioms are non com- positional multiword combinations, such as punto de vista ‘perspective’, or sin embargo ‘however’, which will have their own entries along with monolexemic lexical units. Collocations are compositional combinations of two lex- …

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