Michael Jungo


2020

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Automatic Creation of Text Corpora for Low-Resource Languages from the Internet: The Case of Swiss German
Lucy Linder | Michael Jungo | Jean Hennebert | Claudiu Cristian Musat | Andreas Fischer
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper presents SwissCrawl, the largest Swiss German text corpus to date. Composed of more than half a million sentences, it was generated using a customized web scraping tool that could be applied to other low-resource languages as well. The approach demonstrates how freely available web pages can be used to construct comprehensive text corpora, which are of fundamental importance for natural language processing. In an experimental evaluation, we show that using the new corpus leads to significant improvements for the task of language modeling.