This is a nice summary of a very interesting (and fun) feature in amazon.com.
-- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 11:06:26 +0100 From: David Oakey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Corpora-List] Additions to amazon.com "Search Inside" feature Apologies if I'm be reporting something that everyone already knows about except me, but Amazon.com's "Inside this book" feature now provides - for all books in its "Search Inside" scheme - a concordance (in the sense of a frequency list rather than KWIC citations), text statistics, and statistically improbable phrases (SIPs). A SIP works a bit like an n-gram version of a keyword in Wordsmith Tools, with the reference corpus being all the books in Amazon's "Search Inside" corpus. If Amazon finds "a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book." On the shopping page for the book "Into the void with Ace Frehley," (the notoriously spaced former guitarist in the rock band KISS) for example, the SIP they list is "black nail polish". This is impressive - and not at all improbable - if you know much about the career of Ace Frehley. The concordance results are presented alphabetically, with more frequent words shown in a larger font size. Text statistics include standard readability indices (the Fog Index seems apt here) and they have a "fun stats" section where they calculate words per dollar and words per ounce (words per pound and words per kilo on amazon.co.uk). More information on the Amazon site about the number of books in the scheme (yes, 120,000 books, 33 million pages etc., but that was nearly 2 years ago), their subject areas, authorship details etc. would of course be useful. While this is intended as a marketing feature (it "allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy"), I believe it would be interesting to corpora list members in itself. Best wishes, David Oakey ------------------------------ Lecturer in English Language English for International Students Unit University of Birmingham, UK phone: + 44 121 4145703 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.eisu.bham.ac.uk/staff/oakeydavid.htm ------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nlpatumd/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
