Ubuntu-fr: a Large and Open Corpus for Supporting Multi-Modality and Online Written Conversation Studies

We present a large, free, French corpus of online written conversations extracted from the Ubuntu platform’s forums, mailing lists and IRC channels. The corpus is meant to support multi-modality and diachronic studies of online written conversations. We choose to build the corpus around a robust metadata model based upon strong principles, such as the "stand off" annotation principle. We detail the model, we explain how the data was collected and processed in terms of meta-data, text and conversation and we detail the corpus’ contents through a series of meaningful statistics. A portion of the corpus about 4,700 sentences from emails, forum posts and chat messages sent in November 2014 is annotated in terms of dialogue acts and sentiment. We discuss how we adapted our dialogue act taxonomy from the DIT++ annotation scheme and how the data was annotated, before presenting our results as well as a brief qualitative analysis of the annotated data.