Korpuslinguistik
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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.
^This paper describes DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, and the rationale behind its development. We discuss its design, its legal background, how to access it, available metadata, linguistic annotation layers, underlying standards, ongoing developments, and aspects of using the archive for empirical linguistic research. The focus of the paper is on the advantages of DEREKO’s design as a primordial sample from which virtual corpora can be drawn for the specific purposes of individual studies. Both concepts, primordial sample and virtual corpus are explained and illustrated in detail. Furthermore, we describe in more detail how DEREKO deals with the fact that all its texts are subject to third parties’ intellectual property rights, and how it deals with the issue of replicability, which is particularly challenging given DEREKO’s dynamic growth and the possibility to construct from it an open number of virtual corpora.