Towards a reference corpus of web genres

Genres of spoken and written texts are being intensively studied from various angles, e.g., communication studies, discourse analysis, computational linguistics, without arriving at a generally accepted definition. Many corpora have been built to represent the language, but very few large corpora indicate genres, and when they do the typology of genres varies widely. For instance, the Brown corpus famously uses 15 textual categories, from press reportage (a text genre) to religion or skills and hobbies (domains), while the British National Corpus (BNC) uses 70 classes, such as academic or non-academic scientific texts or biography. Interestingly, genre classes in the BNC are an add-on proposed by David Lee (2001) 1 after the corpus construction, rather than a basic criterion of the corpus creation. The genre attribute was included in a few collections used in Information Retrieval (TREC HARD 2003 and TREC HARD 2004). More precisely, in TREC HARD 2003, genre was included among the metadata in the following form: