frTenTen: Corpus of the French Web
The French Web Corpus (frTenTen) is a French corpus made up of texts collected from the Internet. The corpus belongs to the TenTen corpus family which is a set of web corpora built using the same method with a target size 10+ billion words. Sketch Engine currently provides access to TenTen corpora in more than 40 languages. The French Web corpus contains many varieties of the French language – European, Canadian and African French.
Detailed information about TenTen corpora is on the separate page Common TenTen corpora attributes.
The most recent version of the frTenTen corpus consists of 23.8 billion words. The texts were downloaded between 2022 and 2023. The sample texts of the largest web domains which account for 25% of all corpus texts were checked semi-manually and content with poor quality texts and spam was removed.
Part-of-speech tagset
The French Web corpora are annotated by the FreeLing tool using the following POS tags. The French Web 2012 corpus (frTenTen12) was annotated by the TreeTagger tool using the following POS tags.
Overview of French TenTen corpora
This is a list of French Web corpora available in Sketch Engine:
- French Web corpus 2023 (frTenTen23) – 23.8 billion words, genre annotation and topic classification (FreeLing tagset)
- French Web corpus 2020 (frTenTen20) – 15.1 billion words, genre annotation and topic classification (FreeLing tagset)
- French Web corpus 2017 (frTenTen17) – 5.7 billion words (FreeLing tagset)
- French Web corpus 2012 (frTenTen12) – 9.8 billion words (TreeTagger tagset)
Genre annotation and topic classification
A part of the French Web 2023 corpus contains genre annotation and topic classification. These can be displayed as corpus structures in Concordance or in the Text type Analysis tool. Genres refer to writing styles and are divided into three groups (blog, discussion) whereas topic classification is inspired by categories used by https://curlie.org/ (formerly dmoz.org) and includes the following topics: arts, beauty & fashion, cars & bikes, economy & financne & business, education, games, health, history, hobbies, home & family & children, religion, science, sex, sports, and technology & IT.
- genres cover 8.2% of the corpus, i.e. 2.3 billion tokens
- topic classification covers about 3% of the corpus, i.e. 770 million tokens
Basic frequency statistics of the French Web 2023 corpus
| Tokens | 27,878,396,026 |
| Words | 23,874,070,858 |
| Sentences | 1,229,197,424 |
| Web pages | 61,252,688 |
Tools to work with the French corpus from the web
A complete set of Sketch Engine tools is available to work with this French corpus to generate:
- word sketch – French collocations categorized by grammatical relations
- thesaurus – synonyms and similar words for every word
- keywords – terminology extraction of one-word and multi-word units
- word lists – lists of French nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. organized by frequency
- n-grams – frequency list of multi-word units
- concordance – examples in context
- text type analysis – statistics of metadata in the corpus
Changelog
frTenTen22 (January 2024)
frTenTen20 (August 2022)
- downloaded by SpiderLing in Oct, Nov & Dec 2019, Jan 2020, Dec 2020 and Jan 2021
- initial version – 26,774,601,851 billion tokens
- annotated by FreeLing pipeline v3
- new term grammar 2.0
frTenTen17 (December 2018)
- crawled in December 2017
- annotated by FreeLing pipeline v2
frTenTen12 version 2 (February 18 2015)
- retokenised and processed with up-to-date versions of tools (TreeTagger pipeline v2)
- Spanish documents filtered out
frTenTen12 version 1 (April 2012)
- initial version – 10.7 billion word (February 2012)
- annotated by TreeTagger pipeline
Bibliography
TenTen corpora
SUCHOMEL, Vít. Better Web Corpora For Corpus Linguistics And NLP. 2020. Available also from: https://is.muni.cz/th/u4rmz/. Doctoral thesis. Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics, Brno. Supervised by Pavel RYCHLÝ.
Jakubíček, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kovář, V., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2013, July). The TenTen corpus family. In 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL (pp. 125-127).
Suchomel, V., & Pomikálek, J. (2012). Efficient web crawling for large text corpora. In Proceedings of the seventh Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC7) (pp. 39-43).
Genre annotation
SUCHOMEL, Vít. Genre Annotation of Web Corpora: Scheme and Issues. In Kohei Arai, Supriya Kapoor, Rahul Bhatia. Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2020, Volume 1. Vancouver, Canada: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2021. s. 738-754. ISBN 978-3-030-63127-7. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-63128-4_55.
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