A Wikipedia-based corpus reference tool

Abstract

This paper describes a dictionary-like reference tool that is designed to help users find information that is similar to what one would find in a dictionary when looking up a word, except that this information is extracted automatically from large corpora. For a particular vocabulary item, a user can view frequency information, part-of-speech distribution, word-forms, definitions, example paragraphs and collocations. All of this information is extracted automatically from corpora and most of this information is extracted from Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia is a massive corpus covering a diverse range of general topics, this information is probably very representative of how target words are used in general. This project has applications for English language teachers and learners, as well as for language researchers.