The CompWHoB Corpus: Computational Construction, Annotation and Linguistic Analysis of the White House Press Briefings Corpus

The CompWHoB (Computational White House press Briefings) Corpus, currently being developed at the UniversityofNaplesFedericoII,isacorpusof spoken American English focusing on politicalandmediacommunication. ItrepresentsalargecollectionoftheWhiteHouse Press Briefings, namely, the daily meetings held by the White House Press Secretary and the news media. At the time of writing, the corpus amounts to more than 20 million words, covers a period of time of twenty-one years spanning from 1993 to 2014 and it is planned to be extended to the end of the second term of President Barack Obama. The aim of the present article is to describe the composition of the corpus and the techniques used to extract, process and annotate it. Moreover, attentionispaidtotheuseoftheTemporalRandomIndexing(TRI)onthecorpusasatool for linguistic analysis

Il CompWHoB Corpus, in sviluppo presso l’Universit`a di Napoli FedericoII, `euncorpusdiparlatoingleseamericano comprendente le conferenze condotte dai segretari statunitensi per i rapporti con la stampa, definite come Press Briefings. Allo stato attuale il corpus `e composto da pi`u di 20 milioni di parole e si estende dal 1993 sino a fine 2014. L’obiettivo di questo articolo `e di descrivere la composizione del corpus, le tecniche utilizzate per estrarre ed annotare i testi, e mostrare come possa fungere da fonte di analisi linguistica attraverso l’utilizzo del Temporal Random Indexing (TRI).