# The Vast and the Focused: On the need for thematic web and blog corpora

Adrien Barbaresi

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## To cite this version:

Adrien Barbaresi. The Vast and the Focused: On the need for thematic web and blog corpora. 7th Workshop on Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora (CMLC-7), Jul 2019, Cardiff, United Kingdom. pp.29-32. hal-02447305

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# The Vast and the Focused: On the need for thematic web and blog corpora

Adrien Barbaresi

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
Jägerstraße 22/23
D-10117 Berlin

barbaresi@bbaw.de

## Abstract

As the Web ought to be considered as a series of sources rather than as a source in itself, a problem facing corpus construction resides in meta-information and categorization. In addition, we need focused data to shed light on particular subfields of the digital public sphere. Blogs are relevant to that end, especially if the resulting web texts can be extracted along with metadata and made available in coherent and clearly describable collections.

## 1 Problem description

The Web brings an unparalleled and rapidly evolving diversity in terms of speakers and settings. As such it should be considered as a series of sources rather than as a source in itself. Science needs an agreed scheme for identifying and registering research data (Sampson, 2000), in that sense schemes and methods are needed to live up to the potential of these potential sources for corpus construction. “Offline corpora” accessible within or throughout institutions are now standard among the research community. The process notably involves “crawling, downloading, ‘cleaning’ and deduplicating the data, then linguistically annotating it and loading it into a corpus query tool.” (Kilgarriff, 2007) It relies on the assumption that “the Web is a space in which resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).” (Berners-Lee et al., 2006) The Web is however changing faster than the researchers’ ability to observe it (Hendler et al., 2008), and a constant problem faced by web resources resides in meta-information and categorization. Due to the “heterogeneous and somewhat intractable character of the Web” (Bergh and Zanchetta, 2008), the actual contents of a web corpus can only be listed with certainty once the corpus is complete. In addition, web corpora exemplify “problems of large corpora

built in short time and with little resources.” (Baroni and Ueyama, 2006)

In fact, corresponding to the potential lack of information concerning the metadata of the texts is a lack of information regarding the content, whose adequacy, focus and quality has to be assessed in a post hoc evaluation (Baroni et al., 2009). The ability to describe a corpus accurately significantly increases its interest for researchers in the humanities and beyond. This is neither a trivial task nor a secondary one, as some assume that “text category is the most important organizing principle of most modern corpora” (O’Keeffe and McCarthy, 2010). Renouf (2007) also claims that lack of metadata makes an exhaustive study impossible or at least undermines it. Categories such as audience, authorship and artifact (Warschauer and Grimes, 2007), or authorship, mode, audience, aim, domain, and the annotation of textual dimensions (Sharoff, 2018) target this issue in particular.

Besides, a major fault line exists for the linguistic community between general and specific corpora (Gries, 2009). Since web corpora mostly follow from the existing linguistic tradition, their purpose and their methodology can also be divided into two main categories (Barbaresi, 2015). On the one hand there are all-purpose, “one size fits all” corpora, often designed to be large and diverse. On the other, there are specific corpora with controlled text inclusions and possibly rich metadata, built with particular research goals in mind, such as online news corpora or variation-aware approaches which take production conditions into account. This distinction also overlaps with diverging uses for corpora, for example corpus-based studies observing already known phenomena, and more opportunistically-minded research settings where size and content diversity allow for better coverage and use of statistical indicators. The contrast between general-purpose

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and specific corpora is not clear-cut as these categories are not impermeable: it is possible to find corpora that are in-between, or transferred from one to another due to later developments in corpus design.

## 2 From the vast to the focused

Seen from a practical perspective, the purpose of focused web corpora is to complement existing collections, as they allow for better coverage of specific written text types and genres, especially the language evolution seen through the lens of user-generated content, which gives access to a number of variants, socio- and idiolects. Methods consisting of “manually selecting, crawling and cleaning particular web sites with large and good-enough-quality textual content” (Spoustová and Spousta, 2012) are part of focused corpora, while focused crawling does not necessarily involve scrupulous work *a priori* but in any case the prioritization “towards documents which, according to some metric, have a high relevance” (Biemann et al., 2013). Even for comparatively large corpora, focused web corpus construction using pre-selected sources can lead to a higher yield and save time and resources while increasing the text quality of the resulting corpus (Schäfer et al., 2014).

The present use case concerns German, for which historical and contemporary corpora have been built as part of an aggregated lexical information platform (Geyken et al., 2017), the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS).<fnref n="1" /> Specialized web corpora are built (Barbaresi, 2016) which can then be compared to existing resources such as newspaper and general-purpose corpora. Among other things, such corpora can be used to search for definitory elements related to newly created words or word senses (Barbaresi et al., 2018), for example by means of an automated content extraction and manual screening of pre-selected results.

A fundamental argument in favor of such corpora is related to the principles of the “Net economy” with the re-composition of the media landscape it fosters. It has seen the raise of “ immaterial labor”, “a social power that is independent and able to organize both its own work and its relations with business entities”, where notions of “leisure time” and “working time” are fused and

where the “split between author and audience” is transcended (Lazzarato, 1996). In some contexts the notion of “free labor” is also relevant to describe “the moment where [the] knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities.” (Terranova, 2000) These conditions of text production have to be accounted for, notably because they help creating a “long tail of bloggers who get little or no remuneration” (Rocamora, 2018) Community-building and content publishing among producers-consumers result in a major increase of text production which leads to more efficient corpus construction and potentially to a text collection that is easier to categorize.

Blogs seem to be particularly adequate as “the practice of blogging involves producing digital content with the intention of sharing it asynchronously with a conceptualized audience.” (boyd, 2006) From the beginning of research on blogs/weblogs, the main definitory criterion has been their form, a reverse chronological sequences of dated entries and/or the use of dedicated software to articulate and publish the entries, a “weblog publishing software tool” (Glance et al., 2004) or content management system. Blogs are dynamic in nature, in consequence they “differ from static webpages because they capture ongoing expressions, not the edits of a static creation.” (boyd, 2006) Another potential advantage in the case of focused crawls consists of the community-building aspects, as blogs are intricately intertwined in what has been called the blogosphere, as the active cross-linking helps to “create a strong sense of community” (Glance et al., 2004), which could help to find series of texts on a given topic by following links, that is by way of web crawling (Olston and Najork, 2010).

Difficulties raised by blogs as research objects are of conceptual and practical nature. First, the definition of what belongs to the genre and its use as a single category is controversial (Garden, 2012). This typology has notably been criticized for not being specific enough, especially concerning the sociolinguistic setting (Lomborg, 2009). A further demarcation can be made between blogs and social networks restricted to a single platform: “They differ from community tools because the expressions are captured locally, not in a shared common space.” (boyd, 2006) These local spaces feature much less restrictions for machine-based access but also feature less directly exploitable

<footnote n="1">¹https://www.dwds.de</footnote>
metadata, although the profusion of user data on
social media platforms can be of great value, for
example to study linguistic variation (Barbaresi
and Ruiz Tinoco, 2018). Consequently, the ex-
traction of relevant content and metadata is highly
relevant in order to make such web corpora ex-
ploitable. Finally, the commonly found term of
blogosphere suggests a connection that does not
necessarily exist, in opposition to the concept of
“blogipelago”, which “reminds us of separateness,
disconnection, and the immense effort it can take
to move from one island or network to another”
(Dean, 2010). This effort clearly impacts corpus
construction by requiring more screening as well
as significant “island hopping”. This is for exam-
ple the case in communities which are fairly small
and disconnected from other websites on the topic,
e.g. Austrian fashion blogs which appear to refer
to each other but do not often include links to other
similar communities or topics. In the end, it is
quite rare to find ready-made resources, especially
for a topically focused approach, so that gathering
methods and criteria ought to be discussed. As in
genre-based studies, manual annotation – for ex-
ample through crowdsourcing – can be an option
for assessing the content of web texts and pave the
way for classification tasks, but the lack of pre-
existing data makes a pioneering work necessary
(Asheghi et al., 2014). Provided this assumption
is correct, collecting restricted portions of the Web
for linguistic research remains nevertheless possi-
ble with sufficient screening.

3 Preliminary conclusions

Following the research on blogs/weblogs, we de-
fine blogs according to their form, consisting of
dated entries available online and often managed
by a broadly available publishing tool or web
space. The discovery of relevant portions of
the web is performed semi-automatically by pre-
selecting hundreds of sources. Second, important
metadata such as the publication date and main
text content are extracted automatically based on
structural patterns as well as heuristic criteria on
text and markup. The resulting text base resides
in a subset of web pages which have been found,
downloaded and processed; documents with non-
existent or missing date or entry content are dis-
carded during processing and are not part of the
corpus. By checking the seen web pages as to
their relevance, it becomes possible to benefit from

the insertion into a “web territory” (Cardon et al.,
2011) that implies virtual communities as well as a
complex adaptation process, which is also relevant
from a linguistic standpoint. Surveys of particu-
lar portions of the web can also feature additional
criteria such as content licensing, as some public
licenses could help contributing back the corpus
construction work to the research community.

We need both data and scientific instruments
to shed light on subfields of the digital public
sphere such as websites devoted to information
technology (Pohlmann and Barbaresi, 2019), fash-
ion & beauty, or literature. These topics in partic-
ular have the advantage of being among the most
present online while mostly addressing comple-
mentary “prosumer” communities, even if stud-
ies relying on website publishing and blogging
activities face a long tail with respect to impact
and readership as well as concerning the move to-
wards other publishing platforms and other con-
tent types. Nonetheless, some interlinking exists,
webpages and especially blogs are still alive and
relevant to gather corpus evidence. In the end,
compared to “pre-web” and general-purpose cor-
pora, challenges reside (1) in the necessity to con-
sider texts types and topics beyond the previous
extension of these notions and beyond known cate-
gories, (2) in a corresponding mapping of relevant
portions of the web, and (3) in the ability to extract
and pre-process resulting web texts and ultimately
to make them available in clearly describable and
coherent collections.

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