EsPal: one-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

Area of Science:

• Computational Linguistics
• Lexicography
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Linguistic research requires comprehensive data on word properties.
• Existing resources may lack specific data for Spanish or detailed structural information.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce EsPal, a web-accessible repository for Spanish word properties.
• Provide a flexible and extensible platform for linguistic data analysis.

Main Methods:

• Compiled data from a 300-million-token written corpus and a 460-million-token subtitle corpus.
• Extracted properties including word frequency, orthographic and phonological structure, subword units (bigrams, trigrams, biphones, bisyllables), and subjective ratings (e.g., imageability).
• Indexed lemma and part-of-speech information with frequencies.

Main Results:

• EsPal offers a wide range of properties for Spanish words.
• The repository includes detailed subword structure and phonological neighborhood data.
• Users can query properties for uploaded words or retrieve words based on property constraints.

Conclusions:

• EsPal provides a valuable, extensible resource for Spanish language research.
• The repository facilitates diverse linguistic analyses, from computational modeling to psycholinguistic experiments.
• Future updates will expand the available properties and data coverage.