From D-Coi to SoNaR: a reference corpus for Dutch

The computational linguistics community in The Netherlands and Belgium has long recognized the dire need for a major reference corpus of written Dutch. In part to answer this need, the STEVIN programme was established. To pave the way for the effective building of a 500-million-word reference corpus of written Dutch, a pilot project was established. The Dutch Corpus Initiative project or D-Coi was highly successful in that it not only realized about 10% of the projected large reference corpus, but also established the best practices and developed all the protocols and the necessary tools for building the larger corpus within the confines of a necessarily limited budget. We outline the steps involved in an endeavour of this kind, including the major highlights and possible pitfalls. Once converted to a suitable XML format, further linguistic annotation based on the state-of-the-art tools developed either before or during the pilot by the consortium partners proved easily and fruitfully...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Nelleke Oostdijk, Martin Reynaert, Paola Monachesi, Gertjan van Noord, Roeland Ordelman, Ineke Schuurman, Vincent Vandeghinste
• Keywords: 500-million-word Reference Corpus, Education, LREC 2008, Major Reference Corpus, Reference Corpus