Corporalarge

Corporalarge is an open-source software library designed to manage, process, and analyze very large text corpora for natural language processing and digital humanities. The project emphasizes scalable data structures, out-of-core computation, and streaming ingestion to enable researchers to work with terabytes of text efficiently. Core capabilities include high-throughput ingestion, fast indexing, and flexible querying, with support for common formats such as plain text, JSON, and XML, as well as integration with storage backends and Python-based data pipelines.

Etymology: The name is a portmanteau of corpus (text corpus) and large, signaling its focus on large-scale text data. The term is not tied to a single formal standard and is used primarily within the project's community.

Architecture and features: The library provides a modular architecture consisting of a core engine for out-of-core processing, an indexing layer for fast search, and adapter modules for data formats and storage systems. It offers a high-level API for creating and manipulating corpora, computing token frequencies, generating concordances, and performing contextual queries. The design prioritizes reproducibility and interoperability, with language bindings and compatibility with popular data science ecosystems.

History and reception: Corporalarge was initiated by a consortium of researchers in computational linguistics and digital humanities, with an initial public release in 2023. Development is community-driven, hosted on a public repository, and released under an open-source license. The project has seen uptake in university labs and digital humanities projects, though it has also faced critique for complexity and resource requirements in extremely large deployments.

See also: Corpus linguistics, Text mining, Big data, Natural language processing.