zhTenTen: Corpus of the Chinese Web

The Chinese Web Corpus (zhTenTen) is a Chinese corpus made up of texts collected from the Internet. The corpus belongs to the TenTen corpus family which is a set of the 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 30 languages. The corpora are built using technology specialized in collecting only linguistically valuable web content.

Data of the last version of the Chinese web corpus was crawled by the SpiderLing web spider in August and November 2017 and comprised of more than 15.9 billion words. The corpus was processed with Stanford NLP Core Tools. The corpus was divided into 2 language variants:

  • Chinese Simplified corpus with Simplified Chinese characters
  • Chinese Traditional corpus with Traditional Chinese characters

Detailed information about TenTen corpora is on the separate page Common TenTen corpora attributes.

Part-of-speech tagset

The zhTenTen corpus was POS annotated by the Stanford Log-linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger using Chinese Penn TreeBank, see the tagset legend.

Overview of Chinese TenTen corpora

A list of Chinese TenTen corpora available in Sketch Engine:

  • Chinese Web corpus 2017 Simplified (zhTenTen17) – 13.5 billion words
  • Chinese Web corpus 2017 Traditional (zhTenTen11) – 2.4 billion words
  • Chinese Web corpus 2011 (zhTenTen11) – 1.7 billion words

zhTenTen 2017 corpus in detail

Basic information (Chinese Web 2017 Simplified)

Frequency*
Tokens 16,593,146,196
Words 13,531,331,169
Sentences 667,201,792
Web pages 40,233,300

Basic information (Chinese Web 2017 Traditional)

Frequency*
Tokens 2,977,351,219
Words 2,400,405,372
Sentences 130,120,839
Web pages 7,538,026

Tools to work with the Chinese corpus

A complete set of tools is available to work with this Chinese corpus from the web to generate:

  • word sketch – Chinese 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 Chinese 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

December 2018 – January 2019

  • new data downloaded by SpiderLing in Aug & Nov 2017
  • size 19.6 billion tokens
  • classifcation of language variants (Simplified and Traditional)
  • foreign languages filtered

February 2017

  • new word sketch grammar prepared by Ondřej Svoboda

October 2016

  • created preloaded subcorpora

2nd December 2011

  • initial version – 1.7 billion words

TenTen corpora

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).

Other relating bibliographic references

Kilgarriff, A., Keng, N., & Smith, S. (2015). Learning Chinese with the Sketch Engine. In Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts (pp. 63-73). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Shih, M. H., & Hsieh, S. K. (2014). Sketching the Dependency Relations of Words in Chinese. ROCLING XXVI (2014), 139.

Search the Chinese corpus

Sketch Engine offers a range of tools to work with this Chinese corpus.

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