The digital ecosystem: a corpus study of the Spanish language [monograph presentation]

Abstract

Spanish is the third most widely used language on the Internet. It is therefore necessary to turn to the Internet ecosystem in order to study Spanish, both in the description of our linguistic system and in the study of the relationship between language and reality. Rather than linguistics departments in universities, it is the large online sales companies who are leading the development of language programmes for natural language processing such as converting speech to written text, and conversely, transforming written text to speech, as well as morphosyntactic analysers, de-ambiguators, and more. At the same time, users generate such a large quantity of written and oral text on social networks that today the digital ecosystem comprises the largest study corpus of the diverse linguistic use, even though some voices opposed to this approach discredit this corpus as being unregulated by rules-based correction. For both of these reasons, one must to pay careful attention to the digital ecosystem in order to study the real use that speakers of Spanish make of our language, thereby allowing for a reliable analysis based on objective data to be carried out with regard to such disparate and complementary fields.