# The Saudi Novel Corpus: Design and Compilation
## 2 Background and Related Works
### Non-Arabic Corpora  
Currently, there are many European language corpora that were created for different purposes and developed to serve as either general/reference or specialized corpora. In the former, the developer's primary aim is to compile a very large corpus containing a variety of genres and domains of the language under consideration. In contrast, in the latter, corpus developers target a specific genre (e.g., newspaper, literature, academic writing) or context (e.g., translation, language teaching) [3]. As this research focuses on literature, we shed light on the construction of specialized corpora containing literary texts, and novels in particular. Overall, the existing corpora of literature can be divided into two major categories: monolingual and bi-/multilingual [29]. The former includes only texts from only one language, while the latter consists of texts from two or more languages (ibid). The existing monolingual corpora can be further divided into two sub-categories. The first category includes those corpora that contain texts produced by only one author. The Corpus of George MacDonald's Fiction is an excellent example of this type [23]. This corpus contains 41 texts (mainly novels) written by the Scottish author [PERSON] and published between 1858 and 1897. The corpus is comprised of approximately 4.5 million words tagged with POS classes. Another example of this sub-category is the DNov corpus, which contains the novels of the well-known English writer [PERSON] [18]. This corpus was built through the CLiC Dickens Project, a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham. It contains 15 novels which collectively comprise around 3.8 million words. The DNov texts were also tagged along different elements, including quotation, suspension, and sentence. This corpus is integrated into a web interface designed to facilitate the efficient use of the corpus, available via: [[https://clic.bham.ac.uk](https://clic.bham.ac.uk)]([https://clic.bham.ac.uk](https://clic.bham.ac.uk)), accessed on 12 April 2022. Another corpus of the same category but from another European language is the Contemporaneous Spanish Novels Corpus, created in 2005, available via: [[http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-W0041/](http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-W0041/)]([http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-W0041/](http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-W0041/)), accessed on 12 April 2022. It contains 11 novels (638,099 words) written by [PERSON]. However, access to this corpus is not free; therefore, searching its content is restricted. A final example of this sub-category is the Corpus of [PERSON]'s novels, created in 2017 to represent the Swedish writer [PERSON], available via: [[https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/resources/strindbergromaner](https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/resources/strindbergromaner)]([https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/resources/strindbergromaner](https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/resources/strindbergromaner)), accessed on 12 April 2022. The corpus contains around 4.3 million words. Notably, this corpus is not devoted to novels alone, as texts from drama form a portion of it. The corpus content can be searched via the concordance tool 'Korp' [30]. Although these corpora are beneficial for analyzing the features of the linguistic style of a particular writer, the results obtained from them cannot be generalized and extended to the style of other novels in the language under consideration. The second sub-category of monolingual corpora includes those that comprise a range of novels authored by different writers. This includes the Corpus of Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction [31]. This corpus contains 143 literary texts (e.g., novels, short stories) written by 89 writers, comprising around 9.7 million words. A distinctive feature of this corpus is the chronological presentation of the included data, which are split into three periods.