Using Language Resources in Humanities research

Abstract

In this paper we present two real cases, in the fields of discourse analysis of newspapers and communication research which demonstrate the impact of Language Resources (LR) and NLP in the humanities. We describe our collaboration with (i) the Feminario research group from the UAB which has been investigating androcentric practices in Spanish general press since the 80s and whose research suggests that Spanish general press has undergone a dehumanization process that excludes women and men and (ii) the “Municipals'11 online” project which investigates the Spanish local election campaign in the blogosphere. We will see how NLP tools and LRs make possible the so called ‘e-Humanities research' as they provide Humanities with tools to perform intensive and automatic text analyses. Language technologies have evolved a lot and are mature enough to provide useful tools to researchers dealing with large amount of textual data. The language resources that have been developed within the field of NLP have proven to be useful for other disciplines that are unaware of their existence and nevertheless would greatly benefit from them as they provide (i) exhaustiveness -to guarantee that data coverage is wide and representative enough- and (ii) reliable and significant results -to guarantee that the reported results are statistically significant.

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