Segment-Level Register Analysis of the Multilingual Web

Erik Henriksson, Alireza Razzaghi, Tomasz Galica, Jiaqi Feng Guo, Anastasia Zhi-Ling Dong, Urho Kunnas, Erofili Psaltaki, Tuomas Lundberg, Antti Kanner, Veronika Laippala


Abstract
Web registers, the situationally defined varieties of online text, are almost always annotated at document level. A document, however, may contain multiple such varieties. We label 80,000 documents from the HPLT web corpus at segment level in seven languages using the open-weight Gemma 4, reaching Cohen’s κ=0.73 against 1,878 human-annotated segments, comparable to previously reported document-level agreement. We find that most documents have two or more registers, and that they recur in similar positions and combinations across the studied languages. Yet on average, a single register accounts for 73% of the labeled text, and a quarter to a third of segments receive no label. Document-level labels are therefore mostly correct but incomplete. Multi-dimensional analysis shows that the segment-level labels correspond to linguistic differences. In all seven languages, registers are ordered the same way, from informational to involved text.
Anthology ID:
2026.wac-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Nikola Ljubešić, Yves Scherrer, Veronika Laippala, Vuk Dinić, Thom Vaughan
Venues:
WAC | WS
SIG:
SIGWAC
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
200–213
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.19/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Erik Henriksson, Alireza Razzaghi, Tomasz Galica, Jiaqi Feng Guo, Anastasia Zhi-Ling Dong, Urho Kunnas, Erofili Psaltaki, Tuomas Lundberg, Antti Kanner, and Veronika Laippala. 2026. Segment-Level Register Analysis of the Multilingual Web. In Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop, pages 200–213, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Segment-Level Register Analysis of the Multilingual Web (Henriksson et al., WAC 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.19.pdf