A Large SMS Corpus in French: From Design and Collation to Anonymisation, Transcoding and Analysis

In 2011, 90,000 authentic text messages in French were collected from the general public by academics in the south of France in the context of the sud4science LR project (http://www.sud4science.org and www.sms4science.org). This paper retraces the design of the corpus collation, including linking text-message data with usage, before proceeding with a three-step semi- automatic anonymisation process, transcoding of the SMS data into “standardised” French, and an optional linguistic annotation phase. The researchers have started linguistic analyses of language practices and sociolinguistic data contained in the questionnaire. The corpus will be made available for researchers, students and the general public in 2014.