Open Access

There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in some cases, coproduction, of particular actions. In this article, we focus on specialized forms of embodied, institutional activity and focus in particular on simultaneity and the ways in which bodily action enables the progressive formation and reformation of an activity in the light of the (co)participants’ emerging contributions. We address how the routine structure of particular tasks enables participants to anticipate, prepare for, and even initiate actions in advance of the relevant activity and in turn, how participants may seek to ameliorate the interactional import of potentially premature action. The articles explores the interplay of technical practice and interactional organization and points to the distinctive character of embodied action in understanding anticipation and coordination in complex forms of institutional interaction.

N-grams are of utmost importance for modern linguistics and language technology. The legal status of n-grams, however, raises many practical questions. Traditionally, text snippets are considered copyrightable if they meet the originality criterion, but no clear indicators as to the minimum length of original snippets exist; moreover, the solutions adopted in some EU Member States (the paper cites German and French law as examples) are considerably different. Furthermore, recent developments in EU law (the CJEU's Pelham decision and the new right of press publishers) also provide interesting arguments in this debate. The paper presents the existing approaches to the legal protection of n-grams and tries to formulate some clear guidelines as to the length of n-grams that can be freely used and shared.

This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on the International Corpus of English (ICE). As such, ICC will contain approximately the same balance of forty percent of written language and 60 percent of spoken language distributed across 27 different text types and contexts. A number of issues encountered by the project teams are discussed, ranging from copyright and data sustainability to technical advances in data distribution.

Making research data publicly available for evaluation or reuse is a fundamental part of good scientific practice. However, regulations such as copyright law can prevent this practice and thereby hamper scientific progress. In Germany, text-based research disciplines have for a long time been mostly unable to publish corpora made from material outside of the public domain, effectively excluding contemporary works. While there are approaches to obfuscate text material in a way that it is no longer covered by the original copyright, many use cases still require the raw textual context for evaluation or follow-up research. Recent changes in copyright now permit text and data mining on copyrighted works. However, questions regarding reusability and sharing of such corpora at a later time are still not answered to a satisfying degree. We propose a workflow that allows interested third parties to access customized excerpts of protected corpora in accordance with current German copyright law and the soon to be implemented guidelines of the Digital Single Market directive. Our prototype is a very lightweight web interface that builds on commonly used repository software and web standards.

Since the introduction of large language models in Natural Language Processing, large raw corpora have played a crucial role in Computational Linguistics. However, most of these large raw corpora are either available only for English or not available to the general public due to copyright issues. Nevertheless, there are some examples of freely available multilingual corpora for training Deep Learning NLP models, such as the OSCAR and Paracrawl corpora. However, they have quality issues, especially for low-resource languages. Moreover, recreating or updating these corpora is very complex. In this work, we try to reproduce and improve the goclassy pipeline used to create the OSCAR corpus. We propose a new pipeline that is faster, modular, parameterizable, and well documented. We use it to create a corpus similar to OSCAR but larger and based on recent data. Also, unlike OSCAR, the metadata information is at the document level. We release our pipeline under an open source license and publish the corpus under a research-only license.