RKorAPClient: An R Package for Accessing the German Reference Corpus DEREKO via KorAP

摘要

Making corpora accessible and usable for linguistic research is a huge challenge in view of (too) big data, legal issues and a rapidly evolving methodology. This does not only affect the design of user-friendly graphical interfaces to corpus analysis tools, but also the availability of programming interfaces supporting access to the functionality of these tools from various analysis and development environments. RKorAPClient is a new research tool in the form of an R package that interacts with the Web API of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, which provides access to large annotated corpora, including the German reference corpus DEREKO with 45 billion tokens. In addition to optionally authenticated KorAP API access, RKorAPClient provides further processing and visualization features to simplify common corpus analysis tasks. This paper introduces the basic functionality of RKorAPClient and exemplifies various analysis tasks based on DEREKO, that are bundled within the R package and can serve as a basic framework for advanced analysis and visualization approaches.