Clean Corpus of Historical American English (CCOHA)

Corpus

Reem Alatrash, Dominik Schlechtweg, Jonas Kuhn, Sabine Schulte im Walde

The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is one of the most commonly used large corpora in diachronic studies in English. We cleaned the corpus in order to overcome its main limitations, such as inconsistent lemmas and malformed tokens, without compromising its qualitative and distributional properties.

The resulting corpus CCOHA in addition contains a larger number of cleaned word tokens which can offer better insights into language change and allow for a larger variety of tasks to be performed.

Reem Alatrash, Dominik Schlechtweg, Jonas Kuhn and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2020. CCOHA: Clean Corpus of Historical American English. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

The CCOHA corpus can be obtained via the COHA website.

Moreover, we provide the target word list used in the cleaning process.