Building and Exploring Web Corpora (WAC3 - 2007)

Book excerpt: WAC More and more people are using Web data for linguistic and NLP research. The Web as Corpusworkshop (WAC) provides a venue for exploring how we can use it effectively and the advancementsto which this could lead.This book is a collection of the talks presented at the 3 rd WAC in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium).The focus is on the description of Web corpus collection projects, the exploration of Web datacharacteristics from a linguistics/NLP perspective, and on the use of crawled Web data for NLPpurposes. CLEANEVAL Any use of Web data requires that it be cleaned in order to get rid of unwanted material including,for example, HTML markup, navigation bars, advertisements. To date there has been no sharingof resources or expertise in this particular domain and the cleaning has often been done minimally.Cleaneval was an exercise aimed at promoting collaboration and improving our understandingof the issues. Results and perspectives are presented in this book.