The analysis of URLs using natural language processing methods has recently become a research topic by itself, all the more since large URL lists are considered as being part of the big data paradigm. Due to the quantity of available web pages and the costs of processing large amounts of data, it is now an Information Retrieval task to try to classify web pages merely by taking their URLs into account and without fetching the documents they link to.

Why is that so and what can be taken away from these methods?

Interest and objectives

Obviously, the URLs contain clues …

In his professorial thesis (or habilitation thesis), which is about to be made public (the defence takes place next week), Ludovic Tanguy explains why and on what conditions data visualization could help linguists. In a previous post, I showed a few examples of visualization applied to the field of readability assessment. Tanguy’s questioning is more general, it has to do with what is to include in the disciplinary field of linguistics.

He gives a few reasons to use the methods from the emerging field of visual analytics and mentions some of its upholders (like Daniel Keim or Jean-Daniel Fekete …

Document-driven and data-driven, standoff and inline

First of all, the intention of the encoding can be different. Richard Eckart summarizes two main trends: document-driven XML and data-driven XML. While the first uses an « inline approach » and is « usually easily human-readable and meaningful even without the annotations », the latter is « geared towards machine processing and functions like a database record. […] The order of elements often is meaningless. » (Eckart 2008 p. 3)

In fact, several choices of architecture depend on the goal of an annotation using XML. The main division regards standoff and inline XML (also : stand-off and in-line).

The Paula format …

The Falko Project is an error-annotated corpus of German as a foreign language, maintained by the Humboldt Universität Berlin who made it publicly accessible.

Recently a new search engine was made available, practically replacing the old CQP interface. This tool is named ANNIS2 and can handle complex queries on the corpus.

Corpus

There are several subcorpora, and apparently more to come. The texts were written by advanced learners of German. There are most notably summaries (with the original texts and a comparable corpus of summaries written by native-speakers), essays who come from different locations (with the same type of comparable …