usedexamples

Usedexamples is a term used to describe curated collections of real-world usage instances of words, phrases, programming APIs, or other units that illustrate how something is used in context. It serves educational, lexicographic, and documentation roles by providing concrete, verifiable examples drawn from various sources such as corpora, technical documentation, forums, and code repositories. The goal is to illuminate usage patterns, sense disambiguation, and pragmatic nuance through representative instances.

Entries in a usedexamples dataset typically include the text of the example, a source reference, a domain or register tag (for example technical, informal, or literary), and a timestamp. Optional annotations may cover grammatical role, semantic sense, or API parameters. Metadata often includes language, author or provenance, license, and a confidence score. Data formats commonly used are JSON, JSONL, CSV, or structured markup in HTML or XML, frequently with validation schemas to ensure consistency and interoperability.

Applications of usedexamples span language learning and lexicography, where examples support sense disambiguation and usage notes; computational linguistics and natural language processing, for training context-aware models or for evaluating language understanding; and software documentation or API references, where examples demonstrate correct usage. In machine learning, examples can be stratified by domain, register, or task to create contextualized training or test sets that reflect real-world usage.

Creation and governance involve sourcing from licensed or publicly available corpora, or user-contributed submissions with attribution. Quality control combines automated checks with human review. Ethical considerations include copyright, consent, and representation bias; ongoing maintenance requires updating examples to reflect evolving language and software APIs.

See also: concordancer, corpora, usage note, code example, API documentation, example database.