Irish is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists, lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with Irish to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of Irish text.
Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of Irish single-word or multi-word expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can create their own Irish corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.
Tools to work with Irish text corpora
To work with the Irish language, Sketch Engine offers the following tools:
Irish Word Sketch
Word Sketch is the easiest way to get an at-a-glance overview of a word’s behaviour. Collocations are displayed in categorized lists to identify strong and weak collocates easily. more»
Available Word Sketches for user corpora: Full-featured Sketch grammar.
Word Sketch difference will compare two word sketches and will indicate which collocates tend to combine with one word or the other. The information can be used to avoid mistakes in word choice or to study the differences between two words with a similar meaning. more»
Irish concordance
The concordancer included in Sketch Engine can be used to display a list of examples (called concordance) of the search word or phrase as it appears in Irish language text corpora. The search will display the keyword with some context to the right and context to the left of the keyword (KWIC concordance). more»
Irish thesaurus
The thesaurus is a feature that automatically generates a list of words similar in meaning to the keyword. more»
Irish word lists
The word list feature will generate a frequency list of all words that appear in a text or corpus. A very large corpus can be used to generate a list of all words that exist in Irish or all words that start, contain or end with specific characters. Advanced options can be used to generate lists of grammatical categories or parts of speech used in a corpus together with their frequencies. more»
N-grams in Irish
Generating a list of N-grams contained in a text makes it possible to identify and study patterns and notice phenomena related to multi-word units (MWU) in Irish that cannot be detected by other tools. more»
List of available Irish corpora
- trial – available to both trial users as well as paying subscribers
- main – only available to paying subscribers
- on demand – access to the corpus is subject to specific terms, click the corpus name for details
| Corpus | Access policy | Size in words |
|---|---|---|
| CHILDES Gaelic Corpus | main | 16,848 |
| DGT-Translation Memory parallel – Irish | main | 1,065,421 |
| ELEXIS Irish Web 2021 | main | 58,130,702 |
| ELEXIS Irish Web 2021 (gaTenTen21) WSD sample | main | 1,980,914 |
| EUR-Lex 2/2016 parallel – Irish | trial | 31,439,542 |
| Irish Syllabic Poetry, circa 1200-1650 (BARDIC@TCD) | open | 478,445 |
| Irish Trends | trial | 1,824,292 |
| Irish Web 2022 (gaTenTen22) | trial | 125,040,541 |
| The New Corpus for Ireland | main | 29,886,201 |
