CommonCOW: Massively Huge Web Corpora from CommonCrawl Data and a Method to Distribute them Freely under Restrictive EU Copyright Laws
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)
Abstract
In this paper, I describe a method of creating massively huge web corpora from the CommonCrawl data sets and redistributing the resulting annotations in a stand-off format. Current EU (and especially German) copyright legislation categorically forbids the redistribution of downloaded material without express prior permission by the authors. Therefore, such stand-off annotations (or other derivates) are the only format in which European researchers (like myself) are allowed to re-distribute the respective corpora. In order to make the full corpora available to the public despite such restrictions, the stand-off format presented here allows anybody to locally reconstruct the full corpora with the least possible computational effort.