8th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-8) @ ​Corpus Linguistics 2013

Monday, 22 July 2013 (Lancaster, UK)

Endorsed by ​ACL SIGWAC.

Web corpora and other Web-derived data have become a gold mine for corpus linguistics and natural language processing. The Web is an easy source of unprecedented amounts of linguistic data from a broad range of registers and text types. However, a collection of Web pages is not immediately suitable for exploration in the same way a traditional corpus is.

Since the first Web as Corpus Workshop organised at the Corpus Linguistics 2005 Conference, a highly successful series of yearly Web as Corpus workshops provides a venue for interested researchers to meet, share ideas and discuss the problems and possibilities of compiling and using Web corpora. After a stronger focus on application-oriented natural language processing and Web technology in recent years – with workshops taking place at NAACL-HLT 2010, 2011 and WWW 2012 – the 8th Web as Corpus Workshop returns to its roots in the corpus linguistics community.

Accordingly, the leading theme of this workshop is the application of Web data in language research, including linguistic evaluation of Web-derived corpora as well as strategies and tools for high-quality automatic annotation of Web text. We invite papers on all aspects of building and using Web corpora, with a particular focus on (but not limited to) the following:

• applications of Web corpora and other Web-derived data sets for language research
• automatic linguistic annotation of Web data such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and semantic tagging
  (the accuracy of currently available off-the-shelf tools is still unsatisfactory for many types of Web data)
• critical exploration of the characteristics of Web data from a linguistic perspective and its applicability to language research
• presentation of Web corpus collection projects or software tools required for some part of this process (crawling, filtering, de-duplication, language identification, indexing, ...)

Proceedings

Download here.

Programme

9.00 - 11:00	Session 1 (Introduction & Methodology)
9:00	Akshay Minocha, Siva Reddy and Adam Kilgarriff (slides)	Feed Corpus : An Ever Growing Up-to-date Corpus
9:30	Stephen Wattam, Paul Rayson and Damon Berridge (slides)	LWAC: Longitudinal Web-as-Corpus Sampling
10:00	Roland Schäfer, Adrien Barbaresi and Felix Bildhauer (slides)	The Good, the Bad, and the Hazy: Design Decisions in Web Corpus Construction
10:30	Jesse Egbert and Douglas Biber (slides)	Developing a User-based Method of Web Register Classification
11:00 - 11:30	Tea Break
11:30 - 13:00	Session 2 (Methodology 2)
11:30	Alexander Piperski, Vladimir Belikov, Nikolay Kopylov, Vladimir Selegey and Serge Sharoff	Big and diverse is beautiful: A large corpus of Russian to study linguistic variation
12:00	David Lutz, Parry Cadwallader and Mats Rooth (slides)	A web application for filtering and annotating web speech data
12:30	Sarah Schulz, Verena Lyding and Lionel Nicolas (slides)	STirWaC - Compiling a diverse corpus based on texts from the web for South Tyrolean German
13:00 - 14:00	Lunch
14:00 - 15:30	Session 3 (Compilation)
14:00	Adam Kilgarriff and Vít Suchomel (slides)	Web Spam
14:30	Adriano Ferraresi and Silvia Bernardini (slides)	The academic Web-as-Corpus
15:00	Silke Scheible, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Marion Weller and Max Kisselew	A Compact but Linguistically Detailed Database for German Verb Subcategorisation relying on Dependency Parses from a Web Corpus
15:30 - 16:00	Tea Break
16:00 - 18:00	Session 4 (Applications)
16:00	Andrew Brindle	Thug breaks man's jaw: A Corpus Analysis of Responses to Interpersonal Street Violence
16:30	Colleen Crangle	A web-based model of semantic relatedness and the analysis of electroencephalographic (EEG) data
17:00	Discussion and wrap-up
18:00	Pub
19:00	Dinner

Organising committee

• Stefan Evert, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)
• Egon Stemle, European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC)
• Paul Rayson, Lancaster University

Programme committee

Organising committee plus:

• Silvia Bernardini, U of Bologna, Italy
• Paul Cook, U of Melbourne, Australia
• Cédrick Fairon, UCLouvain, Belgium
• William H. Fletcher, U.S. Naval Academy, USA
• Sebastian Hoffmann, U Trier, Germany
• Adam Kilgarriff. Lexical Computing Ltd, UK
• Preslav Nakov, QCRI, Qatar Foundation
• Reinhard Rapp, U Aix-Marseille, France & U Mainz, Germany
• Serge Sharoff, U of Leeds, UK
• Stephen Wattam, Lancaster U, UK
• Eros Zanchetta, U of Bologna, Italy
• Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI, France