Bridging the gap within text-data analytics: a computer environment for data analysis in linguistic research

Abstract

Since computer technology became widespread available at universities during the last quarter of the twentieth century, language researchers have been successfully employing software to analyse usage patterns in corpora. However, although there has been a proliferation of software for different disciplines within text-data analytics, e.g. corpus linguistics, statistics, natural language processing and text mining, this article demonstrates that any computer environment intended to support advanced linguistic research more effectively should be grounded on a user-centred approach to holistically integrate cross-disciplinary methods and techniques in a linguist-friendly manner. To this end, I examine not only the tasks that are derived from linguists' needs and goals but also the technologies that appropriately deal with the properties of linguistic data. This research results in the implementation of DAMIEN, an online workbench designed to conduct linguistic experiments on corpora.