A Corpus of German Reddit Exchanges (GeRedE)

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 6310–6316 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 6310 A Corpus of German Reddit Exchanges (GeRedE) Andreas Blombach, Natalie Dykes, Philipp Heinrich, Besim Kabashi, Thomas Proisl Computational Corpus Linguistics Group Friedrich-Alexander-Universit¨at Erlangen-N¨urnberg Bismarckstr. 6, 91054 Erlangen, Germany {andreas.blombach, natalie.mary.dykes, philipp.heinrich, besim.kabashi, thomas.proisl}@fau.de Abstract GeRedE is a 270 million token German CMC corpus containing approximately 380,000 submissions and 6,800,000 comments posted on Reddit between 2010 and 2018. Reddit is a popular online platform combining social news aggregation, discussion and micro-blogging. Starting from a large, freely available data set, the paper describes our approach to filter out German data and further pre-processing steps, as well as which metadata and annotation layers have been included so far. We explore the Reddit sphere, what makes the German data linguistically peculiar, and how some of the communities within Reddit differ from one another. The CWB-indexed version of our final corpus is available via CQPweb, and all our processing scripts as well as all manual annotation and automatic language classification can be downloaded from GitHub. Keywords: Reddit, Corpus building, Corpus analysis, Social media, CMC, German 1. Introduction Reddit, the self-proclaimed ‘front page of the internet’, combines social news aggregation, discussion and micro- blogging. Since its founding in 2005, it has grown to be one of the most popular websites in the USA. In recent years, its popularity has also increased in Germany, as indicated by site rankings from Alexa and SimilarWeb.1 Reddit is structured into so-called “subreddits” (categories or communities), whose moderators can define and en- force their own community rules (there is, of course, also a sitewide content policy). Subreddits range from being rather open-topic (e. g. r/de – anything related to German and Germany) to extremely specific (e. g. r/wasletztepreis, roughly translating to ‘whatlastprice’ – a sarcastic subreddit dedicated to negative interactions on the German version of Ebay Classified Ads). Users can submit content (e. g. text, images or links) to a sub- reddit and comment on others’ submissions and comments, resulting in nested conversation threads. Both submissions and comments can be voted up or down by the community. The items’ voting score affects the default order in which content is displayed (submissions with the most upvotes are shown on the front page). 1.1. Userbase Reddit’s last official count of monthly active users from November, 2017 puts them at more than 330 million2, a number comparable to that of Twitter. The vast majority of Reddit users (sometimes called “redditors”) comes from English-speaking countries, especially the USA. With some caution, we can probably generalize some information we have on US users: while more women than men use social media in general3, Reddit is much more popular among 1Ranks as of November 30, 2019: Alexa: 6 (US), 9 (DE); SimilarWeb: 11 (US), 33 (DE). https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites 2https://www.redditinc.com 3https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fac t-sheet/social-media men than among women.4 Users are also mostly young (with the highest share of adult users in age …

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