Sketch Engine Project
What is “Sketch Engine”? When I first heard of this system, I
focused on the word “Engine” and then I guessed it’s a kind of engine
that made something work. I was so curious about Sketch Engine that
I searched it on the Internet. The website says,“ The Sketch Engine is
a web-based program which takes as its input a corpus of any
language with an appropriate level of linguistic mark-up.” I can’t wait
to try it. I did believe I could have fun in the Sketch Engine.
First, I clicked “Word Sketch” and typed “ethnography” in the box
and chose “noun.” Then, I clicked on “Show Word Sketch”.
From the screen, it shows a Word Sketch for the noun ethnography.
There are 2550 concordance lines for ethnography. Each column
show the words that typically combine with ethnography in a
particular grammatical relations. I highlighted four most frequent
words in the columns. There are “write”, “use”, “be” and “virtual”. The
blue numbers tell me how many concordance lines there are in the
word. If I clicked it, it will show the context for me. I picked up a
sentence “From such tiny details, great ethnographies are written.”
From this example, I knew the keyword I typed will become bold and
be painted red. It was a remarkable sign while I was browsing through
the pages. The following sentences are the other three examples for
ethnography with different concordances.
1. In all three studies, tools and artifacts previously identified in our
ethnography were similarly used in simulation interviews in a
variety of ways.
2. Thus, ethnography is concerned with learning the total way of life
of a group, their learnt behaviors and, more importantly, the
meanings that are attached to these behaviors.
3. As readers will appreciate, virtual ethnography should never be
considered an easy option.
If I didn’t click the “View options – KWIC/Sentence”, I couldn’t see the
complete sentence. I could just read part of the sentence not
complete one.
When I haven’t clicked “KWIC/Sentence”, I have another way to see
the whole context. I could clicked the red word, the context would pop
out in the bottom, and then I could choose “expand left” or “expand
right” to read the article. The blue-tinted box in the top right-hand
corner tells me which corpus I am using, and how many hits match my
search item. Now, my corpus is ukWaC and there are 110
concordance lines. If I want to get more information about the
source-text, I click the document-id codes at the left-hand end of the
relevant line, which are in blue with many numbers. Next, the
Frequency button allows me to view two types of frequency
information regarding my search term. They are node tags and node
forms.
The node forms tell us “ethnography” is more often the “Ethnography”.
It shows that most articles don’t use ethnography as their starting
word in a sentence. There are about 76 percents articles like to use
small letter for this word. They are not only View options and
Frequency on the second row buttons but also Sample, Filter, Sort,
and Collocation. All these functions help me search the word more
accurate and precise. In short, a Word Sketch is a corpus-based
summary of a word's grammatical and collocation’s behavior.
Second, I clicked on Concordance and there are four sections in
this part. What are they? They are Query, Keywords, Context and Text
Types.
In the beginning, I entered play in the Query the Sketch Engine
generate a concordance of all forms of play such as played, plays,
playing and so on. To make more specific searches, I click on
Keyword. I entered play and chose verb in the PoS. Then the screen
seemed different from my previous search. It has the entire
sentences on the screen and all play are used for verb. After using
Keyword the amount of hits decreased from 742952 to 574065. It
reduced almost a fourth of the hits.
In order to specify context more precisely, I will try more sections to
get more precise data for my search word.
Third, I got into Thesaurus, typed banana in Lemma and chose
noun for Part of speech. Next, I clicked on Show Similar Words and
the top ten thesaurus of banana are almost fruits. They are apples,
tomato, strawberry, pineapple, mango, grape and pear. Are these
thesaurus the real thesaurus of banana? Definitely no! Banana can’t
equal to apple or other fruits. They are totally different. Therefore, I
decided to clicked on blue-tinted word, apple , and a new screen
appeared. In fact, it is another function of Sketch Engine, called
“Sketch–Diff”.
Fourth, I visited Sketch–Diff to see what differences between
banana and apple and to find out why the system put them in the
Thesaurus together. It’s interesting to research how Thesaurus and
Sketch–Diff work. There are three parts, common patterns, “banana”
only patterns and “apple” only patterns, in banana/apple. There is
another way to get in this page. If I clicked “Sketch–Diff”, entered
banana in first lemma and apple in second lemma, chose noun in part
of speech and clicked on “Show Diff” button in the end. The same
screen will pop out.
The system says, “In the "Common Patterns" part, there are four
numbers next to each collocate. The first two indicate the frequency of
co-occurrence with the first and second lemma, the last two show the
salience scores for the collocate with both lemmas.” When I clicked on
197 of apple, it shows me the sentences about banana and apple in
Concordance. It was interesting that I got back to Concordance while
I was using Sketch–Diff few seconds ago. Here is one example from
the context, “You have arranged a fantastic buffet for the practice:
sandwiches, sausage rolls, biscuits, cream cakes and the token apple
and banana.”
The Thesaurus function checks to see which words occur with the
same collocates as other words and shows most similar to the search
word in their use in the language. The Sketch Difference shows those
patterns and combinations that the two words have in common and
also those patterns and combinations that are more typical of, or
unique to, one word rather than the other. After searching Thesaurus
and Sketch-Diff, I knew there is a strong connection in Concordance,
Thesaurus and Sketch-Diff.
Having soaking myself in Sketch Engine for several days, I realize
that it is an enormous website and has a great deal of data. It has
abundant information for English learners to learn English by
themselves. Besides, the sources are plentiful and we can learn
correct English via this web. There are too many advantages for using
Sketch Engine. I can’t write them all at once. However, is Sketch
Engine so perfect that it doesn’t have any disadvantages? Of course
not! Everything has its pro and con and Sketch Engine is not
exceptional. As a novice, Sketch Engine is not suitable for him or her
to learn. Because there are too many data, a novice can’t pick up what
information is appropriate for him or her. If I were a novice in learning
English, I couldn’t stand to read so many sentences at first. My
motivation of learning English would be completely destroyed when I
saw it. Those functions such as Word Sketch, Concordance and so on,
are great, while it is difficult for a beginner to use them. The sections
are too complicated for a beginner to understand. It is a wonderful
website for learners who have learned English more than two or three
years. For a novice, Sketch Engine is too difficult to manipulate.
To sum up, if you want Sketch Engine to learn English by yourself,
you should have the ability to use it and then you would really learn a
lot. If you are a novice in learning English, you shouldn’t use it. For a
novice, you should choose easy and funny textbooks and these can
keep your high motivation in learning English. Using correct
references helps you yield twice the result with half the effort. Briefly,
it is important for everyone to choose the right ways of learning.