The Gulf of Guinea Creole Corpora

Tjerk Hagemeijer, Michel Généreux, Iris Hendrickx, Amália Mendes, Abigail Tiny, Armando Zamora


Abstract
We present the process of building linguistic corpora of the Portuguese-related Gulf of Guinea creoles, a cluster of four historically related languages: Santome, Angolar, Principense and Fa d’Ambô. We faced the typical difficulties of languages lacking an official status, such as lack of standard spelling, language variation, lack of basic language instruments, and small data sets, which comprise data from the late 19th century to the present. In order to tackle these problems, the compiled written and transcribed spoken data collected during field work trips were adapted to a normalized spelling that was applied to the four languages. For the corpus compilation we followed corpus linguistics standards. We recorded meta data for each file and added morphosyntactic information based on a part-of-speech tag set that was designed to deal with the specificities of these languages. The corpora of three of the four creoles are already available and searchable via an online web interface.
Anthology ID:
L14-1376
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
523–529
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/438_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tjerk Hagemeijer, Michel Généreux, Iris Hendrickx, Amália Mendes, Abigail Tiny, and Armando Zamora. 2014. The Gulf of Guinea Creole Corpora. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 523–529, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The Gulf of Guinea Creole Corpora (Hagemeijer et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/438_Paper.pdf