esTenTen, a Vast Web Corpus of Peninsular and American Spanish

Everyone working on general language would like their corpus to be bigger, wider-coverage, cleaner, duplicate-free, and with richer metadata. As a response to that wish, Lexical Computing Ltd. has a programme to develop very large ‘TenTen’ web corpora. In this paper we introduce the Spanish corpus, esTenTen, of 8 billion words and 19 different national varieties of Spanish. We investigate the distance between the national varieties as represented in the corpus, and examine in detail the keywords of Peninsular Spanish vs. American Spanish, finding a wide range of linguistic, cultural and political contrasts.