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Usenet is a large online resource containing user-generated messages (news articles) organised in discussion groups (newsgroups) which deal with a wide variety of different topics. We describe the download, conversion, and annotation of a comprehensive German news corpus for integration in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus hosted at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim.
Maximizing the potential of very large corpora: 50 years of big language data at IDS Mannheim
(2014)
Very large corpora have been built and used at the IDS since its foundation in 1964. They have been made available on the Internet since the beginning of the 90’s to currently over 30,000 researchers worldwide. The Institute provides the largest archive of written German (Deutsches Referenzkorpus, DeReKe) which has recently been extended to 24 billion words. DeReKe has been managed and analysed by engines known as COSMAS and afterwards COSMAS II, which is currently being replaced by a new, scalable analysis platform called KorAP. KorAP makes it possible to manage and analyse texts that are accompanied by multiple, potentially conflicting, grammatical and structural annotation layers, and is able to handle resources that are distributed across different, and possibly geographically distant, storage systems. The majority of texts in DeReKe are not licensed for free redistribution, hence, the COSMAS and KorAP systems offer technical solutions to facilitate research on very large corpora that are not available (and not suitable) for download. For the new KorAP system, it is also planned to provide sandboxed environments to support non-remote-API access “near the data” through which users can run their own analysis programs.
Machine learning methods offer a great potential to automatically investigate large amounts of data in the humanities. Our contribution to the workshop reports about ongoing work in the BMBF project KobRA (http://www.kobra.tu-dortmund.de) where we apply machine learning methods to the analysis of big corpora in language-focused research of computer-mediated communication (CMC). At the workshop, we will discuss first results from training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for the classification of selected linguistic features in talk pages of the German Wikipedia corpus in DeReKo provided by the IDS Mannheim. We will investigate different representations of the data to integrate complex syntactic and semantic information for the SVM. The results shall foster both corpus-based research of CMC and the annotation of linguistic features in CMC corpora.
This paper gives an overview of recent developments in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo in terms of growth, maximising relevant corpus strata, metadata, legal issues, and its current and future research interface. Due to the recent acquisition of new licenses, DeReKo has grown by a factor of four in the first half of 2014, mostly in the area of newspaper text, and presently contains over 24 billion word tokens. Other strata, like fictional texts, web corpora, in particular CMC texts, and spoken but conceptually written texts have also increased significantly. We report on the newly acquired corpora that led to the major increase, on the principles and strategies behind our corpus acquisition activities, and on our solutions for the emerging legal, organisational, and technical challenges.