Developing computational infrastructure for the CorCenCC corpus: The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

Dawn Knight*, Fernando Loizides, Steven Neale, Laurence Anthony, Irena Spasić

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes—National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) is the first comprehensive corpus of Welsh designed to be reflective of language use across communication types, genres, speakers, language varieties (regional and social) and contexts. This article focuses on the computational infrastructure that we have designed to support data collection for CorCenCC, and the subsequent uses of the corpus which include lexicography, pedagogical research and corpus analysis. A grass-roots approach to design has been adopted, that has adapted and extended previous corpus-building and introduced new features as required for this specific context and language. The key pillars of the infrastructure include a framework that supports metadata collection, an innovative mobile application designed to collect spoken data (utilising a crowdsourcing approach), a backend database that stores curated data and a web-based interface that allows users to query the data online. A usability study was conducted to evaluate the user facing tools and to suggest directions for future improvements. Though the infrastructure was developed for Welsh language collection, its design can be re-used to support corpus development in other minority or major language contexts, broadening the potential utility and impact of this work.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)789-816
Number of pages28
JournalLanguage Resources and Evaluation
Volume55
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021 Sept

Keywords

  • Data modelling
  • Information retrieval
  • Language resources
  • Natural language processing
  • Usability testing
  • Web interfaces

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Library and Information Sciences

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