The DiDi Corpus of South Tyrolean CMC Data: A multilingual corpus of Facebook texts
Authors: Jennifer-Carmen Frey, Aivars Glaznieks, Egon W. Stemle (EURAC, 2016)
Topic: Learner Corpora and Language Acquisition

Abstract
The DiDi corpus of South Tyrolean data of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a multilingual sociolinguistic language corpus. It consists of around 600,000 tokens collected from 136 profiles of Facebook users residing in South Tyrol, Italy. In conformity with the multilingual situation of the territory, the main languages of the corpus are German and Italian (followed by English). The data has been manually anonymised and provides manually corrected part-of-speech tags for the Italian language texts and manually normalised data for German texts. Moreover, it is annotated with user-provided socio-demographic data (among others L1, gender, age, education, and internet communication habits) from a questionnaire, and linguistic annotations regarding CMC phenomena, languages and varieties. The anonymised corpus is freely available for research purposes.

Introduction
The autonomous Italian province of South Tyrol is characterized by a multilingual environment with three official languages (Italian, German, and Ladin), an institutional bi- or trilingualism (depending on the percentage of the Ladin population), and diverse individual language repertoires AUTHOR. In the regionally funded DiDi project, the goal was to build a South Tyrolean CMC corpus to document the current language use of residents and to analyse it socio-linguistically with a focus on age. The project initially focused on the German-speaking language group. However, all information regarding the project, e.g.~the invitation to participate, the privacy agreement, the project web site, and the questionnaire for socio-demographic data was published in German and Italian. Hence, we attracted speakers of both Italian and German. Accordingly, the collected data is multilingual, with major parts in German but with a substantial portion in Italian (100,000 of 600,000 tokens). The collected multilingual CMC corpus combines Facebook status updates, comments, and private messages with socio-demographic data (e.g.~language biography, internet usage habits, and general parameters like age, gender, level of education) of the writers. The data was enriched with linguistic annotations on thread, text and token level including language-specific part-of-speech (PoS) and lemma information, normalisation, and language identification. In this paper, we describe the corpus with respect to its multilingual characteristics and give special emphasis to the Italian part of the corpus to which we added manually corrected PoS annotations. Hence, it presents a continuation of Frey et al. AUTHOR which was restricted to German texts of the corpus, not taking into account the full variety of data collected for the total corpus.

Conclusion
In this paper we presented a freely available language corpus of Facebook user profiles from South Tyrol, Italy. The multilingual corpus is anonymised and annotated with socio-demographic data of users, language specific (and for Italian manually corrected) PoS tags, lemmas and linguistic annotations mainly related to used languages, varieties and multilingual phenomena. The corpus is accessible for querying via ANNIS} or can be obtained as processable data for research purposes on . The project was financed by the Provincia autonoma di Bolzano -- Alto Adige, Ripartizione Diritto allo studio, universit\`a e ricerca scientifica, Legge provinciale 13 dicembre 2006, n.~14 "Ricerca e innovazione".