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 …