Why Chinese Web-as-Corpus is Wacky? Or: How Big Data is Killing Chinese Corpus Linguistics

Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014)

Abstract

This paper aims to examine and evaluate the current development of using Web-as-Corpus (WaC) paradigm in Chinese corpus linguistics. I will argue that the unstable notion of wordhood in Chinese and the resulting diverse ideas of implementing word segmentation systems have posed great challenges for those who are keen on building web-scaled corpus data. Two lexical measures are proposed to illustrate the issues and methodological discussions are provided.