Collecting and Analysing Chats and Tweets in SoNaR

Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012)

Abstract

In this paper a collection of chats and tweets from the Netherlands and Flanders is described. The chats and tweets are part of the freely available SoNaR corpus, a 500 million word text corpus of the Dutch language. Recruitment, metadata, anonymisation and IPR issues are discussed. To illustrate the difference of language use between the various text types and other parameters (like gender and age) simple text analysis in the form of unigram frequency lists is carried out. Furthermore a website is presented with which users can retrieve their own frequency lists.