A Synchronous Chinese Language Corpus from Different Speech Communities: Construction and Applications

Similar to other languages such as English, Spanish and Arabic, Chinese is used by a large number of speakers in distinct speech communities which, despite sharing the unity of language, vary in interesting ways, and a systematic study of such linguistic variation is invaluable to appreciate the diversity and richness of the underlying cultures. This paper describes Project LIVAC (Linguistic Variation in Chinese Communities), which focuses on the development of a Chinese corpus, based on data taken concurrently at regular intervals from multiple Chinese speech communities. The resulting database and computerized concordance from the approximately 20 million word corpus with uniform time reference points extending across two years enable linguists and social scientists to undertake meaningful qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis of the development of linguistic and cultural variation. To facilitate these studies, a framework for integrating the corpus with specific corpus analysis applications is proposed. Based on this framework, a prototype retrieval system, which supports longitudinal studies on word and concept distribution, as well as lexical and other linguistic variation, is designed and implemented.