Monolingualkorpora

Monolingualkorpora (literally "monolingual corpora") are curated collections of texts or transcripts in a single language assembled for linguistic research, natural language processing, lexicography, and language teaching. They range from balanced, general-purpose corpora intended to reflect broad language use to specialized corpora focusing on particular genres, registers, domains, or time periods.

Typical content includes written materials (books, newspapers, web text) and spoken material (recordings and transcriptions). Monolingual corpora are often annotated with metadata and linguistic information such as part-of-speech tags, lemmata, syntactic parses, named entities, and timestamp or speaker labels for spoken data. Diachronic corpora document language change by including texts from different historical periods.

Uses of monolingual corpora include frequency and collocation analysis, concordance studies, corpus-driven lexicography, training and evaluation of language models and taggers, and empirical validation of grammatical hypotheses. Popular examples include the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, though many languages have their own monolingual resources.

Construction and maintenance involve sampling strategy, digitization, cleaning, annotation, and attention to legal and ethical issues such as copyright and personal data protection. Limitations of monolingual corpora include representativeness bias, uneven genre coverage, and the need for careful interpretation of quantitative results. Tools for working with such corpora include corpus query systems, concordancers, and machine learning toolkits adapted to textual data.