{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026759167492566897, 'fraction_numerical': 0.016518004625041296, 'mean_word_length': 4.789674952198853, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 2, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Towards the design of the Australian National Corpus

Corpora are becoming more and more important as a research tool for linguists as they are large collections of authentic text. However, not every researcher has the time and resources to compile their own corpus. Large corpora in the world such as the BNC, the ANC or the International Corpus of English (ICE) have been widely used for research on the English language in general or an English dialect in particular. Although there are several corpora of Australian English at the moment, researchers who would like to study an aspect of Australian English or to compare Australian English with other dialects generally have difficulty finding a corpus that meets their needs. One of the reasons for this is that the corpora that are currently available on Australian English are small in size and scope, and most of them are outdated. The Australian Corpus of English (ACE), for example, was created in 1986, more than two decades ago. It consists of one million words and only covers written texts. A more recent corpus, the Australian subcorpus of the ICE, was developed between 1991 and 1995. Although it contains both spoken and written language data, it has only one million words. Other corpora are even smaller in size and cover only certain genres, as suggested by their names. For instance, the Electronic Documents corpus (EDOC) consists of only 200,000 words. The same number of words can be found in the Talkback Radio corpus. The Corpus of High School Writing has only 160,000 words. In contrast, large corpora in the world have or are aiming to have at least 100 million words. For example, the well-known BNC, originally developed between 1991 and 1994, consists of over 100 million words (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk). The ANC is aiming at 100 million words and so far has 22 million words (http://americannationalcorpus.org/SecondRelease). Another widely available corpus of American English, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), has an even larger size with more than 385 million words collected since 1990 (http://www.americancorpus.org). Not only are these corpora large in size, they contain both spoken and written language data and have similar designs. All these characteristics make them attractive to corpus studies of one particular dialect of English or comparative studies of the two main English dialects in the world. A corpus of Australian English as another major English dialect in the world would thus be beneficial to researchers of this specific dialect or researchers who need to compare Australian English with other Englishes, especially British and American English. In order to make the Australian National Corpus (AusNC) useful for comparative studies, it is important that the corpus be comparable to the BNC, ANC, and COCA in terms of both size and design. This study therefore aims at reviewing the design of these three main corpora currently widely used by researchers before proposing a design for the AusNC.