BootCaT: Bootstrapping corpora and terms from the web

Abstract

This paper introduces the BootCaT toolkit, a suite of perl programs implementing an iterative procedure to bootstrap specialized corpora and terms from the web. The procedure requires only a small set of seed terms as input. The seeds are used to build a corpus via automated Google queries, and more terms are extracted from this corpus. In turn, these new terms are used as seeds to build a larger corpus via automated queries, and so forth. The corpus and the unigram terms are then used to extract multi-word terms. We conducted an evaluation of the tools by applying them to the construction of English and Italian corpora and term lists from the domain of psychiatry. The results illustrate the potential usefulness of the tools.