Structuring a CMC corpus of political tweets in TEI: corpus features, ethics and workflow

International audienceThe CoMeRe project (CoMeRe, 2014) aims to build a kernel corpus of computer-mediated communication (CMC) genres with interactions in the French language. Three key words characterize the project: variety, standards and openness. The project gathered mono- and multimodal, synchronous and asynchronous communication data from both Internet and telecommunication networks (text chat, tweets, SMSs, forums, blogs). A variety of interactions was sought: public or private interactions as well as interactions from informal, learning and professional situations. Whereas some CMC data types were collected within the CoMeRe project, others had previously been collected and structured within different project partners’ local research teams. This meant that the project had to overcome disparities in corpus compilation choices. For this reason, the CoMeRe project structured the corpora in a uniform way using the Text Encoding Initiative format (TEI, Burnard & Bauman, 2013) and decided to describe each corpus using Dublin Core and OLAC standards for metadata (DCMI, 2014; OLAC, 2008). The TEI model was extended in order to encompass the Interaction Space (IS) of CMC multimodal discourse (Chanier et al., 2014). The term ‘openness’ also characterizes the project: The corpora have been released as open data on the French national platform of linguistic resources (ORTOLANG, 2013) in order to pave the way for scientific examination by partners not involved in the project as well as replicative and culumative research. This poster presentation aims to give an overview of the corpus building process using, as a case study, a corpus of political tweets cmr-polititweets (Longhi et al., 2014). The corpus stemmed from a local research project on lexicon (Digital Humanities and datajournalism, supported by the Fondation of Cergy-Pontoise University). It was built starting from seven French politicians from six different political parties. In order to generate political tweets, a set of lists citing these politicians was generated (7087 lists), and lists that have tweeted at least six times and for which the description contained the word ‘politics’ were selected (120 lists in total). Finally, 2934 tweets were recovered. In order to be sure that we selected politicians’ tweets (and not, for example, those of journalists), only the accounts cited in more than 12 lists were considered; 205 politicians were tweeting. We took the last 200 tweets of each of the 205 accounts on 27 March 2014 (34,273 tweets). This allowed us to recover data that focused on the period between the two rounds of the 2014 municipal elections in France. The poster will focus, firstly, on how features specific to Twitter were included and structured in the interaction space TEI model. We will exemplify how features including hashtags that label tweets so that other users can see tweets on the same topic, at signs that allow a user to mention or reply to other users and retweets that allow a user to repost a message from another Twitter user and share it with his own followers, were integrated into the model. Secondly, the poster will evoke some of the ethical and rights issues that had to be considered before publishing a corpus of tweets. Finally, the workflow & multi-stage quality control process adopted during the building of the corpus will be illustrated. This was an essential aspect considering that the corpus underwent format conversions: the local research team had initially structured the corpus in XML whilst the CoMeRe project applied the IS TEI model to the corpus.The political tweets corpus is now structured and available online. Analyses have started to be carried out: some ideas have been launched in Djemili et al. (2014) but further analyses must adhere rigorously to methodologies stemming from the natural language processing (NLP) field

The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise

In this chapter we introduce the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise. The mission of ACE is to support researchers engaged in languages which pose particular challenges for analysis; for this, we use the umbrella term “atypical communication”. This includes language use by second-language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from lan-guage disabilities, and languages that pose unique challenges for analysis, such as sign languages and languages spoken in a multilingual context. The chapter presents details about the collaborations and outreach of the centre, the services offered, and a number of showcases for its activities

06491 Abstracts Collection -- Digital Historical Corpora- Architecture, Annotation, and Retrieval

From 03.12.06 to 08.12.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06491 ``Digital Historical Corpora - Architecture, Annotation, and Retrieval\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if availabl

Selected Information Management Resources for Implementing New Knowledge Environments: An Annotated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography reviews scholarly work in the area of building and analyzing digital document collections with the aim of establishing a baseline of knowledge for work in the field of digital humanities. The bibliography is organized around three main topics: data stores, text corpora, and analytical facilitators. Each of these is then further divided into sub-topics to provide a broad snapshot of modern information management techniques for building and analyzing digital documents collections

Keeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)

At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Asociation of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

An ontology for CoNLL-RDF: formal data structures for TSV formats in language technology

In language technology and language sciences, tab-separated values (TSV) represent a frequently used formalism to represent linguistically annotated natural language, often addressed as "CoNLL formats". A large number of such formats do exist, but although they share a number of common features, they are not interoperable, as different pieces of information are encoded differently in these dialects. CoNLL-RDF refers to a programming library and the associated data model that has been introduced to facilitate processing and transforming such TSV formats in a serialization-independent way. CoNLL-RDF represents CoNLL data, by means of RDF graphs and SPARQL update operations, but so far, without machine-readable semantics, with annotation properties created dynamically on the basis of a user-defined mapping from columns to labels. Current applications of CoNLL-RDF include linking between corpora and dictionaries [Mambrini and Passarotti, 2019] and knowledge graphs [Tamper et al., 2018], syntactic parsing of historical languages [Chiarcos et al., 2018; Chiarcos et al., 2018], the consolidation of syntactic and semantic annotations [Chiarcos and Fäth, 2019], a bridge between RDF corpora and a traditional corpus query language [Ionov et al., 2020], and language contact studies [Chiarcos et al., 2018]. We describe a novel extension of CoNLL-RDF, introducing a formal data model, formalized as an ontology. The ontology is a basis for linking RDF corpora with other Semantic Web resources, but more importantly, its application for transformation between different TSV formats is a major step for providing interoperability between CoNLL formats

Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology

No humanists have moved more aggressively in the digital world than students of the Greco-Roman world but the first generation of digital classics has seen relatively superficial methods to address the problems of print culture. We are now beginning to see new intellectual practices for which new terms, eWissenschaft and eClassics, and a new cyberinfrastructure are emerging

NLP for Language Varieties of Italy: Challenges and the Path Forward

Italy is characterized by a one-of-a-kind linguistic diversity landscape in Europe, which implicitly encodes local knowledge, cultural traditions, artistic expression, and history of its speakers. However, over 30 language varieties in Italy are at risk of disappearing within few generations. Language technology has a main role in preserving endangered languages, but it currently struggles with such varieties as they are under-resourced and mostly lack standardized orthography, being mainly used in spoken settings. In this paper, we introduce the linguistic context of Italy and discuss challenges facing the development of NLP technologies for Italy's language varieties. We provide potential directions and advocate for a shift in the paradigm from machine-centric to speaker-centric NLP. Finally, we propose building a local community towards responsible, participatory development of speech and language technologies for languages and dialects of Italy.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 4 table