Q&A

This page lists the questions we received.

Do you have any domain specific corpora?

On the main page you find a listing of different types of corpora we have. Domain specific corpora are the Parliamentary corpora and the Corpora of academic texts. Under the Parallel corpora there are also domain specific corpora.

Are there literary texts available?

From the Public Domain Page you can find a link to the downloadable public domain files in DBNL.

Is there a speech recognition engine available for Belgian Dutch?

Currently, the release of a Belgian Dutch speech recognizer that can be freely used for research is in preparation.

Which corpora are available for Automatic Simplification for Dutch?

There are currently no parallel corpora available in which regular Dutch has been simplified, so this makes it impossible to straightforwardly treat this as a machine translation problem.

If you would consider to develop a form of unsupervised simplification, there are, however, a number of corpora available which can be considered to be in a form of easy Dutch. These corpora are the Wablieft-corpus (Easy Belgian Dutch), the Basilex-corpus (Texts for children in Dutch primary schools), and WAI-NOT (Very easy Belgian Dutch).

Are there any corpora that contain dialogues between two or more people?

There are a number of dialog components in CGN (Spoken Dutch Corpus).

• a. Spontane conversaties ('face-to-face')
• c. Telefoondialogen opgenomen m.b.v. platform
• d. Telefoondialogen opgenomen m.b.v. minidiskrecorder
• e. Zakelijke onderhandelingen

• Download: https://taalmaterialen.ivdnt.org/download/tstc-corpus-gesproken-nederlands/
• Online search: https://portal.clarin.inl.nl/opensonar_frontend/opensonar/search

There is also the IFA Dialog Video corpus.

"A collection of annotated video recordings of friendly Face-to-Face dialogs. It is modelled on the Face-to-Face dialogs in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). The procedures and design of the corpus were adapted to make this corpus useful for other researchers of Dutch speech. For this corpus 20 dialog conversations of 15 minutes were recorded and annotated, in total 5 hours of speech."

• Download: https://taalmaterialen.ivdnt.org/download/tstc-ifa-dialoog-videocorpus/
• Online data: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/IFA-SpokenLanguageCorpora/IFADVcorpus/

Advice for finding financial support for compiling a medical comparable corpus English-Dutch

We are looking into whether this is fundable by CLARIN Resource Families Project Funding. The site indicates that it is best to first submit the idea informally to the CLARIN office, so they can advise us ("In view of the flexible nature of this call, applicants are encouraged to send in a project idea beforehand, in order to allow CLARIN Office to give additional guidelines and assess the eligibility of plans.")

We would need to be clear though as to whether this is a parallel corpus, which is one of the categories in the Resource Families, or whether it is a comparable corpus, which is not one of the categories. We might ask the CLARIN office whether they think it would be useful to add such a category.

We would have to identify a number of potential data sources, and make sure we can make the collected data publicly available for research, without GDPR or IP issues.

We should be aware of the EMEA corpus in OPUS

Is it possible to automate finding of word conversions for specific corpora?

Do you think it is possible to draw up a list of conversion pairs of Dutch, i.e. words that can be used in more than 1 part of speech, on the basis of corpora (or possibly treebanks)? I am particularly concerned with the parts of speech nomen, adjective, and verb. So, for example, the search algorithm should be able to identify the bold words in the following examples as conversion pairs:

• ik douche / ik neem een douche
• wij geloven in iets / zijn geloof in iets
• de crimineel zweert zijn criminele gedrag af
• wij onderhielden contacten / het onderhoud van het huis
• wij droogden het droge laken
• we trommelden op de trommel

Answer: The e-Lex lexicon allows you to search word forms with multiple POS tags, as you ask. This lexicon is based on CGN. But your question goes a little further, I think. The verb geloven has the lemma "geloven", and the conversion to noun has the lemma geloof. So we should see whether the noun's lemma also occurs as a verb form, idem ditto for adjectives. A perl script was written that extracts the requested sets from the lexicon file -- results were sent to the requester.