Generating linguistically relevant metadata for the Royal Society Corpus

This paper provides an overview on metadata generation and management for the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), aiming to encourage discussion about the specific challenges in building substantial diachronic corpora intended to be used for linguistic and humanistic analysis. We discuss the motivations and goals of building the corpus, describe its composition and present the types of metadata it contains. Specifically, we tackle two challenges: first, integration of original metadata from the data providers (JSTOR and the Royal Society); second, derivation of additional linguistically relevant metadata regarding text structure and situational context (register)

The Making of the Royal Society Corpus

The Royal Society Corpus is a corpus of Early and Late modern English built in an agile process covering publications of the Royal Society of London from 1665 to 1869 (Kermes et al., 2016) with a size of approximately 30 million words. In this paper we will provide details on two aspects of the building process namely the mining of patterns for OCR correction and the improvement and evaluation of partof-speech tagging

Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German

We present two comparable diachronic corpora of scientific English and German from the Late Modern Period (17th c.--19th c.) annotated with Universal Dependencies. We describe several steps of data pre-processing and evaluate the resulting parsing accuracy showing how our pre-processing steps significantly improve output quality. As a sanity check for the representativity of our data, we conduct a case study comparing previously gained insights on grammatical change in the scientific genre with our data. Our results reflect the often reported trend of English scientific discourse towards heavy noun phrases and a simplification of the sentence structure (Halliday, 1988; Halliday and Martin, 1993; Biber and Gray, 2011; Biber and Gray, 2016). We also show that this trend applies to German scientific discourse as well. The presented corpora are valuable resources suitable for the contrastive analysis of syntactic diachronic change in the scientific genre between 1650 and 1900. The presented pre-processing procedures and their evaluations are applicable to other languages and can be useful for a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks such as syntactic parsing.This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 232722074 – SFB 1102

Exploring and visualizing variation in language resources

Language resources are often compiled for the purpose of variational analysis, such as studying differences between genres, registers, and disciplines, regional and diachronic variation, influence of gender, cultural context, etc. Often the sheer number of potentially interesting contrastive pairs can get overwhelming due to the combinatorial explosion of possible combinations. In this paper, we present an approach that combines well understood techniques for visualization heatmaps and word clouds with intuitive paradigms for exploration drill down and side by side comparison to facilitate the analysis of language variation in such highly combinatorial situations. Heatmaps assist in analyzing the overall pattern of variation in a corpus, and word clouds allow for inspecting variation at the level of words

Wohin damit? Storing and reusing my language data: Minute Madness der Datenzentren

Präsentiert beim Workshop "Wohin damit? Storing and reusing my language data" am 22. Juni 2023 in Mannheim. Die Präsentation wurde im Kontext der Arbeit des Vereins Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V. gehalten