The CompWHoB Corpus:Computational Construction, Annotation and Linguistic Analysis of the White House Press Briefings Corpus
Authors: Fabrizio Esposito, Pierpaolo Basile, Francesco Cutugno, Marco Venuti (Università di Napoli Federico II, Università di Bari Aldo Moro, Università di Catania, 2015)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The CompWHoB (Computational White House press Briefings) Corpus, currently being developed at the University of Naples Federico II, is a corpus of spoken American English focusing on political and media communication. It represents a large collection of the White House Press Briefings, namely, the daily meetings held by the White House Press Secretary and the news media. At the time of writing, the corpus amounts to more than 20 million words, covers a period of time of twenty-one years spanning from 1993 to 2014 and it is planned to be extended to the end of the second term of President Barack Obama. The aim of the present article is to describe the composition of the corpus and the techniques used to extract, process and annotate it. Moreover, attention is paid to the use of the Temporal Random Indexing (TRI) on the corpus as a tool for linguistic analysis.

Introduction
As political speech has been gaining more and more attention over recent years in the analysis of communication strategies, political corpora have become of paramount importance for the fulfilment of this objective. The CompWHoB Corpus, a spoken American English corpus currently being developed at the University of Naples Federico II, wants to meet the need for political language data, as it focuses on the political and media communication genre. This resource is a large collection of the transcripts of the White House Press Briefings, namely, the daily meetings held by the White House Press Secretary and the news media. As one of the main official channels of communication for the White House, briefings play indeed a crucial role in the administration communication strategies AUTHOR. The corpus currently amounts to more than 20 million words and spans from 1993 to 2014, thus covering a period of time of twenty-one years and five presidencies. Work is underway to extend the corpus so as to reach the end of the second term of President Barack Obama. Unlike other political corpora such as CORPS AUTHOR and the Political Speech Corpus of Bulgarian AUTHOR, the CompWHoB does not include monological situations, due to the inherent dialogical characteristics of the briefings. As other web corpora AUTHOR, the CompWHoB can be considered a web corpus AUTHOR, since its texts are directly extracted from The American Presidency Project website. Moreover, it should be pointed out that WHoB is a pre-existing specialized corpus AUTHOR annotated by using XML mark-up and mainly employed in the field of corpus linguistics. Thus, the aim of the present article is to describe how the corpus can be used as a future resource in different research fields such as computational linguistics, (political) linguistics, political science, etc. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the corpus. Section 3 describes the details of the corpus construction and annotation. The use of TRI on the corpus is then discussed in Section 4. Lastly, Section 5 concludes the paper.

Conclusion
At the time of writing, the CompWHoB Corpus is probably one of the largest political corpora mainly based on spontaneous spoken language. This feature represents one of its strongest points, as the linguistic analysis performed by employing the TRI has proved. As for the near future, two are our main goals: the first one is to make the process of structural annotation as much computational as possible by retrieving information from available political databases; the second one is to provide the corpus with syntactic parsing and improve the overall performance of the linguistic annotation process. In terms of accessibility, we intend to make the CompWHoB Corpus available via the CPQ web interface (Hardie, 2012) by the end of next year. For now, the fully annotated corpus is accessible and available on request.