Néonaute: mining web archives for linguistic analysis 15:30-16:00

Emmanuel Cartier, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris Nord – Université Paris 13
Peter Stirling, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Sara Aubry, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

Néonaute is a project that seeks to study the use of neologisms in French using the web archive collections of the BnF. Initially a one-year project funded by the French Ministry of Culture, it uses a corpus drawn from the daily crawl of around one hundred news sites carried out by the BnF since December 2010. Building on the existing projects Neoveille and Logoscope which seek to detect and track the life-cycle of neologisms, Néonaute aims to use web archives to study the use of neologisms over time.

The objective of the project is to create a search engine, Néonaute, that allows researchers to analyse the occurrence of terms within the collection, with enriched information on the context of use (morphosyntactic analysis) and additional metadata (named entities, themes). Several specific use cases are included in the project:

analysis of the life-cycle of previously identified neologisms;
• comparative use of terms recommended by the DGLFLF, the body in charge of linguistic policy in France, versus terms already in circulation (especially Anglicisms);
• use of terms in feminine gender over the period.

The search engine interface is complemented with an interactive visualization module that allows users to explore the lifecycle of terms over the period, according to various parameters (themes of articles, journals, named entities implied, etc.).

Néonaute is based on the full-text indexing of the news collection carried out by the BnF, which represents 900 million files and 11TB of data. The presentation will discuss the technical challenges and the solutions adopted.

The project is one of an increasing number of uses of the BnF web archives that seek to use techniques of text and data mining (TDM), and the first to use linguistic analysis. Under legal deposit and intellectual property legislation only certain metadata can be used outside the library premises and this kind of project is carried out under research agreements that fix the conditions of use of the collections while respecting the relevant legislation. The presentation will also discuss the issues that the BnF faces in allowing researchers to use such methods on the web archives.