Sketch Engine: a sense discrimination engine for English, Chinese and other languages

1. Background: corpora and concordances Analysis of text and spoken language, for the purposes of second language teaching, dictionary making and other linguistic applications, used to be based on the intuitions of linguists and lexicographers. The compilation of dictionaries and thesauri, for example, required that the compiler read very widely, and record the results of his efforts – the definitions and different senses of words – on thousands, or millions of index cards.