WebBootCaT. Instant Domain-Specific Corpora to Support Human Translators

WebBootCaT: instant domain-specific corpora to support human translators Marco Baroni♣, Adam Kilgarriff♦, Jan Pomik´alek♦♠, and Pavel Rychl´y♠ ♣SSLMIT, Bologna University (Italy) ♦Lexical Computing Ltd, Brighton (UK) ♠Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic) Abstract We present a web service to aid translators by quickly producing corpora for specialist areas, in any of a range of languages, from the web. The underlying BootCaT tools have already been extensively used: here, we present a version which is easy for non-technical people to use as all they need do is fill in a web form. The corpus, once produced, can be either downloaded or loaded into the Sketch Engine, a corpus query tool, for further exploration. Reference corpora are used to identify the key terms in the specialist domain. 1 Introduction Where should a translator look if they want to find the terminology of a specialist area? Regular dictionaries will not cover it, spe- cialist dictionaries, if they exist, will be hard to find and expensive and are likely to be out of date. The obvious answer is the web. In 2006, this is probably what every working translator and terminologist does as a mat- ter of course. The question, then, is how to do it effectively and efficiently. 1 Baroni and Bernardini ([2004]) responded to the challenge with the BootCaT tools. The basic method is • Select a few “seed terms”. • Send queries with the seed terms to Google. • Collect the pages that the Google hits page points to. This is then a first-pass specialist corpus. The vocabulary in this corpus can be com- pared with a reference corpus and terms can be automatically extracted. The process can 1For early accounts of using the web in this way see Varantola ([2000]) and Jones and Ghani ([2000]). For an overview of the use of the web as a source of linguistic data see Kilgarriff and Grefenstette ([2003]). also be iterated with the new terms as seeds to give a “purer” specialist corpus. The software is freely available for down- load and has been widely used, both to produce specialist corpus for technical term extraction (see, e.g., Fantinuoli [2006]) and to produce large general-language cor- pora (Sharoff [2005], Baroni and Kilgarriff [2006]). However, the software must be downloaded and installed, and this presents a barrier for people without computer sys- tems skills. 2 WebBootCaT In this paper we present a web-service ver- sion of the BootCaT tools, WebBootCaT. The user no longer needs to download or in- stall software, as they use a copy of the soft- ware which is already installed on our web- server. Our webserver also holds the cor- pus and loads it into a corpus query tool, the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al [2004]) for further investigation and analysis. For lan- guages where further linguistic processing tools are available (POS-tagging, lemmati- zation), these functions are optional extras. Figure 1 shows the WebBootCat interface. • In the first field, the user inputs the seed terms. They can be either single words, …

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