About Monco
Language changes as we speak. New words and new senses of familiar words are coined and recorded in dictionaries every year. Daily frequencies of 'content words' vary immensely as they are chosen to report events in the media. Words such as ‘vape’, ‘hangry’ or ‘emoji’ are either heavily under-represented or not present at all in reference corpora of English which were compiled only a few years ago. Also, within days, frequencies of words such as ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ may become relatively higher than ever before. Monco can help you keep track of such variation.
The data
We started monitoring a selection of English language news websites in late September 2015. Currently, the index of Monco grows by approximately 8 million words every day. The list of monitored sources is regularly extended, which means that the rate at which it grows is likely to increase over time. Even though Monco’s index is not balanced in the way most reference corpora are, we believe it can be very useful in finding evidence of new developments in global English. By design, we always try to present one-sentence concordance contexts with direct links to the original web pages. We also provide basic mechanisms of dealing with duplicates, which tend to be a problem in web-based corpora.
Current features
Monco supports queries for word forms, lemmas, phrases and basic lexico-grammatical patterns with open part-of-speech positions. It also provides aggregated metadata statistics such as time series or frequency-per-source graphs for all supported corpus queries. Detailed search results can be downloaded as MS Excel spreadsheets and used offline. Programmatic access to the search engine is available upon request.
Future developments
The current version of Monco has 'minimum marketable functionality'. Depending on its popularity, we are planning to implement a range of additional corpus data exploration features. The most imminent of these are daily and hourly keywords lists, on-the-fly phraseology extraction and topic clustering modules. We welcome your comments and feedback at contact@monitorcorpus.com.