Uniform and Effective Tagging of a Heterogeneous Giga-word

Tagging as the most crucial annotation of language resources can still be challenging when the corpus size is big and when the corpus data is not homogeneous. The Chinese Gigaword Corpus is confounded by both challenges. The corpus contains roughly 1.12 billion Chinese characters from two heterogeneous sources: respective news in Taiwan and in Mainland China. In other words, in addition to its size, the data also contains two variants of Chinese that are known to exhibit substantial linguistic differences. We utilize Chinese Sketch Engine as the corpus query tool, by which grammar behaviours of the two heterogeneous resources could be captured and displayed in a unified web interface. In this paper, we report our answer to the two challenges to effectively tag this large-scale corpus. The evaluation result shows our mechanism of tagging maintains high annotation quality. 1. Background With growing interest in Chinese language processing, a few gargantuan Chinese corpora of modern Chinese have been assembled and released with query tools in recent years. For example, the Sinica Corpus (CKIP, 1995/1998) developed by Academia Sinica in Taiwan contains 5.2 million words with part-of-speech tag (POS