SiBol: Corpus of English broadsheet newspapers 1993–2021
The English language newspapers corpus (SiBol) is an English corpus made up of articles collected from various English language newspapers of the years 1993–2021. The SiBol corpus contains around 850 million words in 2 million articles from 18 newspapers. The initial version of the corpus, containing UK broadsheets, was created in 2011 and was extended in 2017 and 2021 to include newspapers from other countries including India, USA, Hong Kong, Nigeria and the Arab world, as well as UK tabloids. The corpus search can be restricted by a specific year, newspaper, author or date.
Part-of-speech tagset
The SiBol corpus was annotated by the TreeTagger tool using the Penn Treebank tagset with Sketch Engine modifications.
Authors of the SiBol corpus
The SiBol corpus was compiled by a small team of linguistics researchers at the Universities of Siena and Bologna.
Content
See graphs describing the distribution of corpus texts according to years and newspaper titles.
Articles by year of publication
Hover over the chart to display the number of tokens of the particular year.
The years 2011, 2012 and 2014 have only 1919 articles in total which is less than 0.1 % of the whole corpus.
Articles by newspaper title
| Newspaper | Number of articles |
| The Times | 447,524 |
| The Daily Telegraph | 362,139 |
| The Guardian | 314,544 |
| Times of India | 255,642 |
| Daily Mirror | 131,674 |
| The Sun | 118,242 |
| New York Times | 94,000 |
| Sunday Times | 84,872 |
| Daily Mail | 62,131 |
| The Express | 34,491 |
| The Sunday Telegraph | 25,340 |
| Metro | 23,970 |
| This Day Lagos | 22,172 |
| South China Morning Post | 19,484 |
| Gulf News | 17,787 |
| The Evening Standard | 13,977 |
| Washington Times | 10,654 |
| Daily News Egypt | 8,486 |
Tools to work with the SiBol corpus
A complete set of Sketch Engine tools is available to work with this English corpus of broadsheet newspapers to generate:
- word sketch – English 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 English nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. organized by frequency
- n-grams – frequency list of multi-word units
- concordance – examples in context
- trends – diachronic analysis automatically identifies neologisms and changes in use
- text type analysis – statistics of metadata in the corpus
Changelog
version 2021 (November 2022)
- data added – 0.5 million articles (200 million words) from 2021
- processed by recent English TreeTagger pipeline version 3.1
- new term grammar version 3.1
version 2.1 (10 July 2017)
- data added – 768,687 articles from 13 newspapers, including 9 new newspapers.
- 9 new newspapers include: Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The New York Times, Washington Post, This Day Lagos, Times of India, Gulf News, Daily News Egypt and South China Morning Post.
- corpus updated using new English processing pipeline. The format of the corpus is now compatible with current user corpora.
version 1.1 (1 Dec 2011)
- recompiled, installed at the production server
version 1.1 (9 Nov 2011)
- changed deduplication settings to “-n 7 -m” – 385 million tokens in 787,000 newspaper articles
- set name to “SiBol/Port” to better reflect the data collections included
version 1 (31 October 2011)
- initial version – 332 million tokens in 643,000 newspaper article
Search the SiBol corpus
Sketch Engine offers a range of tools to work with this English broadsheet newspapers corpus.
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Generate collocations, frequency lists, examples in contexts, n-grams or extracting terms with Sketch Engine. Use our Quick Start Guide to learn it in minutes.
