This post describes an easy and modern way to gather web sources using search engines by adapting the BootCat method, whose positive and negative aspects are discussed.

Two studies centering on visualization of place names in literary texts are introduced. Research on toponym extraction is discussed and in an interdisciplinary perspective: Distant reading and digital literary studies are not mere numeric accounts.

This paper introduces a Twitter corpus focused geographically in order to (1) test selection and collection processes for a given region and (2) find a suitable database to query, filter, and visualize the tweets.

• Barbaresi, A. (2016). Collection and Indexing of Tweets with a Geographical Focus, in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora (LREC 2016), pp. 24-27.

Why Twitter?

“To do linguistics on texts is to do botanics on a herbarium, and zoology on remains of more or less well-preserved animals.”

“Faire de la linguistique sur des textes, c’est faire de la …

I would like to present work on the major social bookmarking and microblogging platform Reddit, which I recently introduced at the NLP4CMC workshop 2015. The article published in the proceedings is available online: Collection, Description, and Visualization of the German Reddit Corpus.

Basic idea

The work described in the article directly follows from the recent release of the “Reddit comment corpus”: Reddit user Stuck In The Matrix (Jason Baumgartner) made the dataset publicly available on the platform archive.org at the beginning of July 2015 and claimed to have any publicly available comment.

Corpus construction

In order to focus on …

I recently presented a paper at the third LRL Workshop (a joint LTC-ELRA-FLaReNet-META_NET workshop on “Less Resourced Languages, new technologies, new challenges and opportunities”).

Motivation

The state of the art tools of the “web as corpus” framework rely heavily on URLs obtained from search engines. Recently, this querying process became very slow or impossible to perform on a low budget.

Moreover, there are diverse and partly unknown search biases related to search engine optimization tricks and undocumented PageRank adjustments, so that diverse sources of URL seeds could at least ensure that there is not a single bias, but …

Web for “old school” balanced corpus

The Czech internet corpus (Spoustová and Spousta 2012) is a good example of focused web corpora built in order to gather an “old school” balanced corpus encompassing different genres and several text types.

The crawled websites are not selected automatically or at random but according to the linguists’ expert knowledge: the authors mention their “knowledge of the Czech Internet” and their experience on “web site popularity”. The whole process as well as the target websites are described as follows:

“We have chosen to begin with manually selecting, crawling and cleaning particular web sites with …

I recently had to deal with a series of files with different encodings in the same corpus, and I would like to share the solution I found in order to try to convert automatically all the files in a directory to the same encoding (here UTF-8).

file -i

I first tried to write a script in order to detect and correct the encoding, but it was everything but easy, so I decided to use UNIX software instead, assuming these tools would be adequate and robust enough.

I was not disappointed, as file for example gives relevant information when used …

I recently worked at the FU Berlin with Roland Schäfer and Felix Bildhauer on issues related to web corpora. One of them deals with corpus construction: as a matter of fact, web documents can be very different, and even after a proper cleaning it is not rare to see things that could hardly be qualified as texts. While there are indubitably clear cases such as lists of addresses or tag clouds, it is not always obvious to define how extensive the notions of text and corpus are. What’s more, a certain amount of documents just end up too close …

I am now part of the COW project (COrpora on the Web). The project has been carried by (amongst others) Roland Schäfer and Felix Bildhauer at the FU Berlin for about two years. Work has already been done, especially concerning long-haul crawls in several languages.

Resources

A few resources have already been made available, software, n-gram models as well as web-crawled corpora, which for copyright reasons are not downloadable as a whole. They may be accessed through a special interface (COLiBrI – COW’s Light Browsing Interface) or downloaded upon request in a scrambled form (all sentences randomly reordered).

This is …

Introduction

I already described how to build a basic specialized crawler on this blog. I also wrote about crawling a newspaper website to build a corpus. As I went on work on this issue, I decided to release a few useful scripts under an open-source license.

The crawlers are not just mere link-harvesters, they are designed to be used as corpus-builders. As one cannot republish anything but quotations of the texts, the purpose is to enable others to make their own version of the corpora. Since the newspapers are updated quite often, it is not imaginable to create exact duplicates …