Know thy Corpus! Robust Methods for Digital Curation of Web corpora

Serge Sharoff


Abstract
This paper proposes a novel framework for digital curation of Web corpora in order to provide robust estimation of their parameters, such as their composition and the lexicon. In recent years language models pre-trained on large corpora emerged as clear winners in numerous NLP tasks, but no proper analysis of the corpora which led to their success has been conducted. The paper presents a procedure for robust frequency estimation, which helps in establishing the core lexicon for a given corpus, as well as a procedure for estimating the corpus composition via unsupervised topic models and via supervised genre classification of Web pages. The results of the digital curation study applied to several Web-derived corpora demonstrate their considerable differences. First, this concerns different frequency bursts which impact the core lexicon obtained from each corpus. Second, this concerns the kinds of texts they contain. For example, OpenWebText contains considerably more topical news and political argumentation in comparison to ukWac or Wikipedia. The tools and the results of analysis have been released.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.298
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2453–2460
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.298
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Serge Sharoff. 2020. Know thy Corpus! Robust Methods for Digital Curation of Web corpora. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2453–2460, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Know thy Corpus! Robust Methods for Digital Curation of Web corpora (Sharoff, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.298.pdf
Code
 ssharoff/robust
Data
WebText