CLASSLA-web: Comparable Web Corpora of South Slavic Languages Enriched with Linguistic and Genre Annotation

Nikola Ljubešić, Taja Kuzman


Abstract
This paper presents a collection of highly comparable web corpora of Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian, covering thereby the whole spectrum of official languages in the South Slavic language space. The collection of these corpora comprises a total of 13 billion tokens of texts from 26 million documents. The comparability of the corpora is ensured by a comparable crawling setup and the usage of identical crawling and post-processing technology. All the corpora were linguistically annotated with the state-of-the-art CLASSLA-Stanza linguistic processing pipeline, and enriched with document-level genre information via the Transformer-based multilingual X-GENRE classifier, which further enhances comparability at the level of linguistic annotation and metadata enrichment. The genre-focused analysis of the resulting corpora shows a rather consistent distribution of genres throughout the seven corpora, with variations in the most prominent genre categories being well-explained by the economic strength of each language community. A comparison of the distribution of genre categories across the corpora indicates that web corpora from less developed countries primarily consist of news articles. Conversely, web corpora from economically more developed countries exhibit a smaller proportion of news content, with a greater presence of promotional and opinionated texts.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.291
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3271–3282
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.291
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikola Ljubešić and Taja Kuzman. 2024. CLASSLA-web: Comparable Web Corpora of South Slavic Languages Enriched with Linguistic and Genre Annotation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3271–3282, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
CLASSLA-web: Comparable Web Corpora of South Slavic Languages Enriched with Linguistic and Genre Annotation (Ljubešić & Kuzman, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.291.pdf