# Q1b · Good corpus characteristics

Subject: Natural Language Processing

Exam: TEE

Reader: https://deep-learning-study-room.vercel.app/nlp/#tee/papers/legacy-r23/q1b

Canonical: https://deep-learning-study-room.vercel.app/read/nlp/tee/papers/legacy-r23--q1b/

Previous examination · complete worked answers

**Question. State the characteristics of a good corpus.** [5 marks]

### Answer

A useful corpus is suited to its task and population: representative genres/languages, adequate size and diversity, balanced or intentionally documented sampling, reliable consistent annotations, clean encoding/tokenization, metadata and provenance, legal/ethical permission, documented train/test splits, and versioned reproducibility. “Large” alone does not imply representative. Example: a medical-tagging corpus needs clinical language and negation annotation; only movie reviews would be unsuitable.