Trye, D., Calude, A. S., Bravo-Marquez, F., & Keegan, T. T. A. G. (2019). Māori loanwords: a corpus of New Zealand English tweets. Presented at the Vocab@Leuven 2019, Florence, italy.
Abstract
Māori loanwords are widely used in New Zealand English for various social functions by New Zealanders within and outside of the Māori community. Motivated by the lack of linguistic resources for studying how Māori loanwords are used in social media, we present a new corpus of New Zealand English tweets. We collected tweets containing selected Māori words that are likely to be known by New Zealanders who do not speak Māori. Since over 30% of these words turned out to be irrelevant (e.g., mana is a popular gaming term, Moana is a character from a Disney movie), we manually annotated a sample of our tweets into relevant and irrelevant categories. This data was used to train machine learning models to automatically filter out irrelevant tweets.
