Abstract
Web corpora and other Web-derived data have become a gold mine for corpus linguistics and natural language processing. The Web is an easy source of unprecedented amounts of linguistic data from a broad range of registers and text types. However, a collection of Web pages is not immediately suitable for exploration in the same way a traditional corpus is. Since the first Web as Corpus Workshop organised at the Corpus Linguistics 2005 Conference, a highly successful series of yearly Web as Corpus workshops provides a venue for interested researchers to meet, share ideas and discuss the problems and possibilities of compiling and using Web corpora. After a stronger focus on application-oriented natural language processing andWeb technology in recent years with workshops taking place at NAACL-HLT 2010, 2011 andWWW2012 the 8thWeb as Corpus Workshop returns to its roots in the corpus linguistics community. Accordingly, the leading theme of this workshop is the application of Web data in language research, including linguistic evaluation of Web-derived corpora as well as strategies and tools for high-quality automatic annotation ofWeb text. The workshop brings together presentations on all aspects of building, using and evaluating Web corpora, with a particular focus on the following topics: applications of Web corpora and other Web-derived data sets for language research automatic linguistic annotation of Web data such as tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemma- tisation and semantic tagging (the accuracy of currently available off-the-shelf tools is still unsatisfactory for many types of Web data) critical exploration of the characteristics of Web data from a linguistic perspective and its applica- bility to language research presentation of Web corpus collection projects or software tools required for some part of this process (crawling, filtering, de-duplication, language identification, indexing, ...)