The Multilingual Affective Soccer Corpus (MASC): Compiling a biased parallel corpus on soccer reportage in English, German and Dutch

The emergence of the internet has led to a whole range of possibilities to not only collect large, but also highly specified text corpora for linguistic research. This paper introduces the Multilingual Affective Soccer Corpus. MASC is a collection of soccer match reports in English, German and Dutch. Parallel texts are collected manually from the involved soccer clubs’ homepages with the aim of investigating the role of affect in sports reportage in different languages and cultures, taking into account the different perspectives of the teams and possible outcomes of a match. The analyzed aspects of emotional language will open up new approaches for biased automatic generation of texts.