BootCaT: Bootstrapping corpora and terms from the web

This paper introduces the BootCaT toolkit, a suite of perl programs implementing an iterative procedure to bootstrap specialized corpora and terms from the web. The procedure requires only a small set of seed terms as input. The seeds are used to build a corpus via automated Google queries, and more terms are extracted from this corpus. In turn, these new terms are used as seeds to build a larger corpus via automated queries, and so forth. The corpus and the unigram terms are then used to extract multi-word terms. An experimental evaluation of the tools applied to the construction of English and Italian corpora and term lists from the domain of psychiatry illustrates their potential usefulness.