RKorAPClient: An R Package for Accessing the German Reference Corpus DeReKo via KorAP

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 7015–7021 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 7015 RKorAPClient: An R Package for Accessing the German Reference Corpus DeReKo via KorAP Marc Kupietz, Nils Diewald, Eliza Margaretha Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache R5 6–13, 68161 Mannheim, Germany {kupietz | diewald | margaretha}@ids-mannheim.de Abstract Making corpora accessible and usable for linguistic research is a huge challenge in view of (too) big data, legal issues and a rapidly evolv- ing methodology. This does not only affect the design of user-friendly graphical interfaces to corpus analysis tools, but also the availability of programming interfaces supporting access to the functionality of these tools from various analysis and development environments. RKorAPClient is a new research tool in the form of an R package that interacts with the Web API of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, which provides access to large annotated corpora, including the German reference corpus DeReKo with 45 billion tokens. In addition to optionally authenticated KorAP API access, RKorAPClient provides further processing and visualization features to simplify common corpus analysis tasks. This paper introduces the basic functionality of RKorAPClient and exemplifies various analysis tasks based on DeReKo, that are bundled within the R package and can serve as a basic framework for advanced analysis and visualization approaches. Keywords: Corpus Tools, Corpus Analysis, Reference Corpora, Data Visualization, R, OAuth, Web Services 1. Introduction With the establishment of corpus linguistic methodology in all areas of linguistics and the associated increased demands on methodological validity and sophistication, research in- stitutions that wish to offer corpora for use by third parties are faced with the question of how they can 1.) satisfy the broad spectrum of user demands; 2.) take into account the fact that the analysis methodology itself is subject of rapid ongoing research, without 3.) infringing on the legitimate interests of the rights of authors and other right holders that are notoriously affected when dealing with linguistic research data. The open source corpus analysis platform KorAP1 (Bański et al., 2012) is part of the CLARIN / CLARIAH infrastruc- ture and one of the main scientific tools for querying and analysing the German Reference Corpus DeReKo, which is with 46.9 billion tokens (Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, 2020) and 45.000 registered users one of the most important empirical bases for German linguistics (Kupietz et al., 2010, 2018b). Under the umbrella of the EuReCo ini- tiative (Kupietz et al., forthcoming), it also provides access to the Contemporary Corpus of the Romanian Language CoRoLa2 (Romanian Academy, 2017; Barbu Mititelu et al., 2018; Cristea et al., 2019) and the Hungarian National Cor- pus HNC (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2018; Oravecz et al., 2014). KorAP attempts to address the challenge of corpus data ac- cessibility with a number of complementary approaches. At the level of the Web user interface, for example, the system- atic application of an extras on demand strategy (Tidwell, 2006, p. 45f) is intended to simultaneously meet the needs …

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