corpus (corpora)
What It Means
A corpus is a large, organized collection of text, documents, or data that companies deliberately gather to train AI systems or analyze patterns. It's like building a specialized library of information that your AI models can learn from to understand language, make predictions, or automate tasks.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
The quality and composition of your training corpus directly determines how well your AI performs and whether it exhibits harmful biases or inaccuracies. Poor corpus selection can lead to discriminatory AI outcomes, regulatory violations, and expensive model failures that damage business operations and reputation.
Real-World Example
A bank building a loan approval AI system creates a corpus from 10 years of loan applications, credit histories, and approval decisions. If this corpus contains historical lending bias against certain demographics, the AI will perpetuate discriminatory practices, potentially violating fair lending laws and exposing the bank to regulatory penalties.
Common Confusion
People often think any collection of data is a corpus, but a true corpus is purposefully curated and structured for specific AI training goals. It's not just raw data dumps or random document collections.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, corpora consist of structured collections of medical records, clinical notes, research papers, and imagin...
Finance: In finance, corpora consist of structured collections of financial documents, regulatory filings, market data, and trans...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"A deliberately assembled collection of knowledge and data (structured and/or unstructured) believed to contain relevant information on a topic or topics to be used by software systems for which useful analysis, prediction, or outcome is being sought. "Source: IEEE_Guide_IPA
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