Procedures for Corpus of Computing in English (CoCLI) construction and effort calculation in manual construction of corpora

Abstract

The present work aims to describe the methodological procedures of the research entitled “ToGatherUp: a prototype of a tool for corpora construction” that verified the effect of incorporating ToGatherUp in necessary time and effort invested in manual construction of Corpus of Computing in English (CoCLI). To this end, we discuss how the research authors developed a set of metrics for measuring effort – Activity Effort (EA), Total Effort for Text Collection (ETCT) and Total Project Effort (ETP) – which served as the basis for conducting a comparative statistical experiment between the manual elaboration of two identical versions of the CoCLI: which differ from each other by one of them using the ToGatherUp and the other one not using it. The experiment shows an average reduction of 7.47% in the ETP when using ToGatherUp compared to the ETP when not using the tool. This result corroborates the hypothesis that the tool reduces the time and effort spent by the researcher on manual elaboration projects of corpora.