SINICA CORPUS : Design Methodology for Balanced Corpora

The Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus (Sinica Corpus) is the first balanced Chinese corpus with part-of-speech tagging. The corpus (Sinica 2.0) is open to the research community through the WWW (http://www.sinica.edu.twiftmsbinikiwi.sh). Current size of the corpus is 3.5 million words, and the immediate expansion target is five million words. Each text in the corpus is classified and marked according to five criteria: genre, style, mode, topic, and source. The feature values of these classifications are assigned in a hierarchy. Subcorpora can be defined with a specific set of attributes to serve different research purposes. Texts in the corpus are segmented according to the word segmentation standard proposed by the ROC Computational Linguistic Society. Each segmented word is tagged with its part-of-speech. Linguistic patterns and language structures can be extracted from the tagged corpus via a corpus inspection program which has the functions of KWIC searching, filtering, statistics, printing, and collocation.