New blog on Language Resources

Students from the 2009-10 course on Language Resources will be publishing their reviews in this blog.

Reviews

A review is a widespread literary genre. See for example this Wikipedia definition:

A review is an evaluation of a publication, such as a movie (a movie review), video game,musical composition (music review of a composition or recording), book (book review); a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert,a play, musical theater show or dance show. In addition to a critical evaluation, the review’s author may assign the work a rating to indicate its relative merit. More loosely, an author may review current events, trends, or items in the news. A compilation of reviews may itself be called a review. The New York Review of Books, for instance, is a collection of essays on literature, culture, and current affairs. National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., is an influential conservative magazine, andMonthly Review is a long-running socialist periodical.

In scientific literature, the literature review is a category of scientific paper, which provides a synthesis of research on a topic at that moment in time. A compilation of these reviews forms the core content of a ‘tertiary’ scientific journal, with examples including Annual Reviews, the Nature Reviews series of journals and Trends. A peer review is the process by which scientists assess the work of their colleagues that has been submitted for publication in the scientific literature. A software review is also a form of peer review, by the co-workers.

I’ve asked students to review three language resources, typically a dictionary, a text corpus and a translation tool, but they can choose a different one.

I will be considering these aspects (which account for 40% of the grade):

• Documentation (quotations and references of source material), avoiding plagiarism.
• Quality of contents (style, grammar, originality, relevance), innovation of personal contribution
• Adequacy (format, structure, contents). Relevant from the point of view of a blog will be tags and categories.

We will see that the overall quality is quite high.