Anastasia Zhi-Ling Dong
Author directory2026
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
Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
Erik Henriksson | Alireza Razzaghi | Tomasz Galica | Jiaqi Feng Guo | Anastasia Zhi-Ling Dong | Urho Kunnas | Erofili Psaltaki | Tuomas Lundberg | Antti Kanner | Veronika Laippala
Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
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.