The Netlog Corpus. A Resource for the Study of Flemish Dutch Internet Language

Mike Kestemont, Claudia Peersman, Benny De Decker, Guy De Pauw, Kim Luyckx, Roser Morante, Frederik Vaassen, Janneke van de Loo, Walter Daelemans


Abstract
Although in recent years numerous forms of Internet communication ― such as e-mail, blogs, chat rooms and social network environments ― have emerged, balanced corpora of Internet speech with trustworthy meta-information (e.g. age and gender) or linguistic annotations are still limited. In this paper we present a large corpus of Flemish Dutch chat posts that were collected from the Belgian online social network Netlog. For all of these posts we also acquired the users' profile information, making this corpus a unique resource for computational and sociolinguistic research. However, for analyzing such a corpus on a large scale, NLP tools are required for e.g. automatic POS tagging or lemmatization. Because many NLP tools fail to correctly analyze the surface forms of chat language usage, we propose to normalize this ‘anomalous' input into a format suitable for existing NLP solutions for standard Dutch. Additionally, we have annotated a substantial part of the corpus (i.e. the Chatty subset) to provide a gold standard for the evaluation of future approaches to automatic (Flemish) chat language normalization.
Anthology ID:
L12-1558
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1569–1572
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/938_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mike Kestemont, Claudia Peersman, Benny De Decker, Guy De Pauw, Kim Luyckx, Roser Morante, Frederik Vaassen, Janneke van de Loo, and Walter Daelemans. 2012. The Netlog Corpus. A Resource for the Study of Flemish Dutch Internet Language. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1569–1572, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The Netlog Corpus. A Resource for the Study of Flemish Dutch Internet Language (Kestemont et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/938_Paper.pdf