Publications

2020

Proceedings of the 12th Web as Corpus Workshop

For almost fifteen years, the ACL SIGWAC, and most notably the Web as Corpus (WAC) workshops, have served as a platform for researchers interested in the compilation, processing and use of webderived corpora as well as computer-mediated communication. Past workshops were co-located with major conferences on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics (such as ACL, EACL, Corpus Linguistics, LREC, NAACL, WWW). In corpus linguistics and theoretical linguistics, the World Wide Web has become increasingly popular as a source of linguistic evidence, especially in the face of data sparseness or the lack of variation in traditional corpora of written language. In lexicography, web data have become a major and wellestablished resource with dedicated research data and specialised tools. In other areas of theoretical linguistics, the adoption rate of web corpora has been slower but steady. Furthermore, some completely new areas of linguistic research dealing exclusively with web (or similar) data have emerged, such as the construction and utilisation of corpora based on short messages. Another example is the (manual or automatic) classification of web texts by genre, register, or – more generally speaking – “text type”, as well as topic area. In computational linguistics, web corpora have become an established source of data for the creation of language models, word embeddings, and all types of machine learning. The 12th Web as Corpus workshop (WAC-XII) looks at the past, present, and future of web corpora given the fact that large web corpora are nowadays provided mostly by a few major initiatives and companies, and the diversity of the early years appears to have faded slightly. Also, we acknowledge the fact that alternative sources of data (such as data from Twitter and similar platforms) have emerged, some of them only available to large companies and their affiliates, such as linguistic data from social media and other forms of the deep web. At the same time, gathering interesting and relevant web data (web crawling) is becoming an ever more intricate task as the nature of the data offered on the web changes (for example the death of forums in favour of more closed platforms).

2019

Building Computer-Mediated Communication Corpora for sociolinguistic Analysis

Communication between humans via networked devices has become an everyday part of people’s lives across generations, cultures, geographical areas, and social classes. Shaped by the specific social and technical context in which it is produced, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become increasingly participatory, interactive, and multimodal. User interactions and user-generated social media content offer a wide range of research opportunities for a growing multidisciplinary research community. This edited volume combines methodological papers that focus on building and annotating CMC corpora and papers that offer a sociolinguistic analysis of different CMC corpora. The diversity of languages represented in the corpora include Arabic, French, German, Italian, English and Slovenian. In fact, the increasingly multilingual nature of CMC data is a recurring theme throughout the volume, as are the references to the importance of and compliance with standards for CMC corpora development in order to facilitate (the?) re-examination of corpora for reproducibility, and for other areas and objectives of investigation. All but one paper are extended papers from the 2017 edition of the CMC and Social Media Corpora Conference held in Bolzano, Italy where the community met to discuss themes that related to the interaction between language, CMC, and society.

2017

Proceedings of the 5th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities

This volume presents the proceedings of the 5th edition of the annual conference series on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (cmc-corpora2017). This conference series is dedicated to the collection, annotation, processing, and exploitation of corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media for research in the humanities. The annual event brings together language-centered research on CMC and social media in linguistics, philologies, communication sciences, media and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, text technology, and machine learning. The 5th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities was held at Eurac Research on October, 4th and 5th, in Bolzano, Italy. This volume contains extended abstracts of the invited talks, papers, and extended abstracts of posters presented at the event. The conference attracted 26 valid submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least two members of the scientific committee. This committee decided to accept 16 papers and 8 posters of which 14 papers and 3 posters were presented at the conference. The programme also includes three invited talks: two keynote talks by Aivars Glaznieks (Eurac Research, Italy) and A. Seza Doğruöz (Independent researcher) and an invited talk on the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) given by Darja Fišer, the CLARIN ERIC Director of User Involvement.

2016

Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X) and the EmpiriST Shared Task

The World Wide Web has become increasingly popular as a source of linguistic data, not only within the NLP communities, but also with theoretical linguists facing problems of data sparseness or data diversity. Accordingly, web corpora continue to gain importance, given their size and diversity in terms of genres/text types. The field is still new, though, and a number of issues in web corpus construction need much additional research, both fundamental and applied. These issues range from questions of corpus design (e.g., assessment of corpus composition, sampling strategies and their relation to crawling algorithms, and handling of duplicated material) to more technical aspects (e.g., efficient implementation of individual post-processing steps in document cleaning and linguistic annotation, or large-scale parallelization to achieve web-scale corpus construction). Similarly, the systematic evaluation of web corpora, for example in the form of task based comparisons to traditional corpora, has only recently shifted into focus. For almost a decade, the ACL SIGWAC (http://www.sigwac.org.uk/), and especially the highly successful Web as Corpus (WAC) workshops have served as a platform for researchers interested in compilation, processing and application of web-derived corpora. Past workshops were co-located with major conferences on computational linguistics and/or corpus linguistics (such as EACL, NAACL, LREC, WWW, and Corpus Linguistics). WAC-X also featured the final workshop of the EmpiriST 2015 shared task “Automatic Linguistic Annotation of Computer-Mediated Communication / Social Media” (see https://sites.google.com/site/empirist2015/ for details) and the panel discussion “Corpora, open science, and copyright reforms” (see https://www.sigwac.org.uk/wiki/WAC-X#paneldisc for details).

2013

Open Corpus Interface for Italian Language Learning

In this article, we present the multi-faceted interface to the open PAISÀ corpus of Italian. Created within the project PAISÀ (Piattaforma per l’Apprendimento dell’Italiano Su corpora Annotati) [1], the corpus is designed to be freely available for non-commercial processing, usage and distribution by the public. Hence, this automatically annotated corpus (for lemma, part-of-speech and dependency information) is exclusively composed of documents licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licenses [2].The dedicated corpus interface is designed to provide flexible, powerful, and easy-to-use modes of corpus access, with the objective to support language learning, language practicing and linguistic analyses. We present in detail the interface’s functionalities and discuss the underlying design decisions. We introduce the four principal components of the interface, describe supported display formats and present two specific features added to increase the interface’s relevance for language learning. The main search components are (1) a basic search that adopts a “Google-style” search box, (2) an advanced search that provides elaborated graphical search options, and (3) a search that makes use of the powerful CQP query language of the Open Corpus Workbench [3]. In addition, (4) a filter interface for retrieving full-text corpus documents based on keyword searches is available. It is likewise providing the means for building temporary sub-corpora for specific topics. Users can choose among different display formats for the search results. Besides the established KWIC (KeyWord In Context) and full sentence views, graphical representations of the dependency relation information as well as keyword distributions are available. These dynamic displays are based on a visualisation for dependency graphs [4] and one for Word Clouds [5], which build on latest developments in information visualisation for language data. Two special features for novice learners are integrated into each search component. The first feature is a function for restricting search results to sentences of limited complexity. Search results are automatically filtered based on formal text characteristics such as sentence length, vocabulary, etc. The second is the supply of pre-defined search queries for linguistic constructions such as sentences in passive voice, questions, etc. Finally, we show how the PAISÀ interface can be employed in different language teaching tasks. In particular, we present a complete unit of work aimed at learners of Italian (CEFR level A2/B1) and centered on students’ direct use of the interface and its functionalities. By doing so, we are giving concrete examples for targeted searches and interactions with the provided language material, as well as an exemplification of how the use of the corpus can be integrated with communicative language activities in the classroom.

2013

Proceedings of the 8th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-8)

Web corpora and other Web-derived data have become a gold mine for corpus linguistics and natural language processing. The Web is an easy source of unprecedented amounts of linguistic data from a broad range of registers and text types. However, a collection of Web pages is not immediately suitable for exploration in the same way a traditional corpus is. Since the first Web as Corpus Workshop organised at the Corpus Linguistics 2005 Conference, a highly successful series of yearly Web as Corpus workshops provides a venue for interested researchers to meet, share ideas and discuss the problems and possibilities of compiling and using Web corpora. After a stronger focus on application-oriented natural language processing andWeb technology in recent years with workshops taking place at NAACL-HLT 2010, 2011 andWWW2012 the 8thWeb as Corpus Workshop returns to its roots in the corpus linguistics community. Accordingly, the leading theme of this workshop is the application of Web data in language research, including linguistic evaluation of Web-derived corpora as well as strategies and tools for high-quality automatic annotation ofWeb text. The workshop brings together presentations on all aspects of building, using and evaluating Web corpora, with a particular focus on the following topics: applications of Web corpora and other Web-derived data sets for language research automatic linguistic annotation of Web data such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemma- tisation and semantic tagging (the accuracy of currently available off-the-shelf tools is still unsatisfactory for many types of Web data) critical exploration of the characteristics of Web data from a linguistic perspective and its applica- bility to language research presentation of Web corpus collection projects or software tools required for some part of this process (crawling, filtering, de-duplication, language identification, indexing, …)

2011

PaddyWaC: A Minimally-Supervised Web-Corpus of Hiberno-English

Small, manually assembled corpora may be available for less dominant languages and dialects, but producing web-scale resources remains a challenge. Even when considerable quantities of text are present on the web, finding this text, and distinguishing it from related languages in the same region can be difficult. For example less dominant variants of English (e.g. New Zealander, Singaporean, Canadian, Irish, South African) may be found under their respective national domains, but will be partially mixed with Englishes of the British and US varieties, perhaps through syndication of journalism, or the local reuse of text by multinational companies. Less formal dialectal usage may be scattered more widely over the internet through mechanisms such as wiki or blog authoring. Here we automatically construct a corpus of Hiberno-English (English as spoken in Ireland) using a variety of methods: filtering by national domain, filtering by orthographic conventions, and bootstrapping from a set of Ireland-specific terms (slang, place names, organisations). We evaluate the national specificity of the resulting corpora by measuring the incidence of topical terms, and several grammatical constructions that are particular to Hiberno-English. The results show that domain filtering is very effective for isolating text that is topic-specific, and orthographic classification can exclude some non-Irish texts, but that selected seeds are necessary to extract considerable quantities of more informal, dialectal text.

2010

Anaphoric Annotation of Wikipedia and Blogs in the Live Memories Corpus

2007

Harvesting Relations from the Web - Quantifiying the Impact of Filtering Functions