Corpus

In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules on specific universe.

A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpus) or text data in multiple languages (multilingual corpus). Multilingual corpora that have been specially formatted for side-by-side comparison are called aligned parallel corpora.

In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known as annotation.