Introducing and evaluating ukWaC, a very large web-derived corpus of English

Abstract

In this paper we introduce ukWaC, a large corpus of English constructed by crawling the .uk Internet domain. The corpus contains more than 2 billion tokens and is one of the largest freely available linguistic resources for English. The paper describes the tools and methodology used in the construction of the corpus and provides a qualitative evaluation of its contents, carried out through a vocabularybased comparison with the BNC. We conclude by giving practical information about availability and format of the corpus.