A corpus is a collection of text that is used for research in natural language processing (NLP) or computational linguistics. A corpus consists of one or more documents; how documents are defined (and how long each document tends to be) depends on the particular corpus. In a corpus of news articles, for instance, it is likely that each article will be considered a document.
Files in a corpus are the actual computer files used to store the corpus on disk. The correspondence between files and documents can vary. In particular, one file may contain a single document, or it may contain multiple documents. It is also possible that a file may contain a fragment of a document (with the rest of that document stored in other files), or fragments of multiple different documents, or some complete documents and fragments of other documents.
The Infomap NLP software does not currently except corpora in these more complicated formats. It accepts two types of corpora:
It is still possible to work with corpora in other formats, by filtering these corpora with other software that accepts their formats as input and generates output in one of the two formats understood by the Infomap software. Since the Infomap formats are very simple, it should in most cases be quite easy to write such filters.
The purpose of this tutorial is to illustrate the Infomap corpus formats by example, and to walk you through the stages of converting a corpus into the Infomap format and using the Infomap NLP software to build models from the converted corpus.