We present a study whose objective is to compare several dependency parsers for English applied to a specialized corpus for building distributional count-based models from syntactic dependencies. One of the particularities of this study is to focus on the concepts of the target domain, which mainly occur in documents as multi-terms and must be aligned with the outputs of the parsers. We compare a set of ten parsers in terms of syntactic triplets but also in terms of distributional neighbors extracted from the models built from these triplets, both with and without an external reference concerning the semantic relations between concepts. We show more particularly that some patterns of proximity between these parsers can be observed across our different evaluations, which could give insights for anticipating the performance of a parser for building distributional models from a given corpus

We present a study in which we compare 11 different French dependency parsers on a specialized corpus (consisting of research articles on NLP from the proceedings of the TALN conference). Due to the lack of a suitable gold standard, we use each of the parsers’ output to generate distributional thesauri using a frequency-based method. We compare these 11 thesauri to assess the impact of choosing a parser over another. We show that, without any reference data, we can still identify relevant subsets among the different parsers. We also show that the similarity we identify between parsers is confirmed on a restricted distributional benchmark.

We present a 78.8-million-tweet, 1.3-billion-word corpus aimed at studying regional variation in Canadian English with a specific focus on the dialect regions of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Our data collection and filtering pipeline reflects complex design criteria, which aim to allow for both data-intensive modeling methods and user-level variationist sociolinguistic analysis. It specifically consists in identifying Twitter users from the three cities, crawling their entire timelines, filtering the collected data in terms of user location and tweet language, and automatically excluding near-duplicate content. The resulting corpus mirrors national and regional specificities of Canadian English, it provides sufficient aggregate and user-level data, and it maintains a reasonably balanced distribution of content across regions and users. The utility of this dataset is illustrated by two example applications: the detection of regional lexical and topical variation, and the identification of contact-induced semantic shifts using vector space models. In accordance with Twitter’s developer policy, the corpus will be publicly released in the form of tweet IDs.