Abstract
For many languages there are no large, general-language corpora available. Until the web, all but the institutions could do little but shake their heads in dismay as corpus-building was long, slow and expensive. But with the advent of the Web it can be highly automated and thereby fast and inexpensive. We have developed a corpus factory where we build large corpora. In this paper we describe the method we use, and how it has worked, and how various problems were solved, for eight languages: Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish, Telugu, Thai and Vietnamese. We use the BootCaT method: we take a set of 'seed words' for the language from Wikipedia. Then, several hundred times over, we * randomly select three or four of the seed words * send as a query to Google or Yahoo or Bing, which returns a 'search hits' page * gather the pages that Google or Yahoo point to and save the text. This forms the corpus, which we then * 'clean' (to remove navigation bars, advertisements etc) * remove duplicates * tokenise and (if tools are available) lemmatise and part-of-speech tag * load into our corpus query tool, the Sketch Engine The corpora we have developed are available for use in the Sketch Engine corpus query tool.- Anthology ID:
- L10-1044
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2010
- Address:
- Valletta, Malta
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/79_Paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Adam Kilgarriff, Siva Reddy, Jan Pomikálek, and Avinesh PVS. 2010. A Corpus Factory for Many Languages. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- A Corpus Factory for Many Languages (Kilgarriff et al., LREC 2010)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/79_Paper.pdf