The CoMeRe corpus for French : structuring and annotating heterogeneous CMC genres

Abstract

The CoMeRe project aims to build a kernel corpus of different computer-mediated communication (CMC) genres with interactions in French as the main language, by assembling interactions stemming from networks such as the Internet or telecommunications, as well as mono and multimodal, and synchronous and asynchronous communications. Corpora are assembled using a standard, thanks to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format. This implies extending, through a European endeavor, the TEI model of text, in order to encompass the richest and the more complex CMC genres. This paper presents the Interaction Space model. We explain how this model has been encoded within the TEI corpus header and body. The model is then instantiated through the first four corpora we have processed: three corpora where interactions occurred in single-modality environments (text chat, or SMS systems) and a fourth corpus where text chat, email, and forum modalities were used simultaneously.