CCAE: A Corpus of Chinese-based Asian Englishes

TL;DR

This paper introduces CCAE, a large-scale corpus of Chinese-based Asian English varieties, enabling NLP research on World Englishes and Chinese Englishes, with preliminary experiments demonstrating its practical utility.

Contribution

It creates the first publicly accessible multi-variety corpus of Chinese-based Asian Englishes, facilitating NLP studies in language variation and downstream applications.

Findings

CCAE contains 340 million tokens from six regions.

Preliminary experiments show the corpus's usefulness for language modeling.

The corpus supports research on Asian Englishes and Chinese Englishes.

Abstract

Language models have been foundations in various scenarios of NLP applications, but it has not been well applied in language variety studies, even for the most popular language like English. This paper represents one of the few initial efforts to utilize the NLP technology in the paradigm of World Englishes, specifically in creating a multi-variety corpus for studying Asian Englishes. We present an overview of the CCAE -- Corpus of Chinese-based Asian English, a suite of corpora comprising six Chinese-based Asian English varieties. It is based on 340 million tokens in 448 thousand web documents from six regions. The ontology of data would make the corpus a helpful resource with enormous research potential for Asian Englishes (especially for Chinese Englishes for which there has not been a publicly accessible corpus yet so far) and an ideal source for variety-specific language modeling and downstream tasks, thus setting the stage for NLP-based World Englishes studies. And preliminary experiments on this corpus reveal the practical value of CCAE. Finally, we make CCAE available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/CCAE/CCAE-Corpus}{this https URL}.