The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM) is a monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2022, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. It is available via GitHub:
Collection methodology
Please check out our overview paper.
Overview paper
We have published a paper that explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE in 2021. It documents the process of compiling and organizing CoSEM and describes the corpus’s initial structure and composition. We further discuss the social variables used in tagging the data, as well as ethical challenges, advantages, and disadvantages unique to online message datasets. In addition, we present preliminary analyses of two selected CSE features: (1) the Hokkien-derived expression (bo)jio and (2) sentence-final adverbs (already, also, only). We concluded the article with notes on future directions.
The paper can be found here.
To Cite
Please cite the overview paper if you use our corpus or mention it in your work.
Gonzales, Wilkinson Daniel Wong, Mie Hiramoto, Jakob Leimgruber, Jun Jie Lim. 2021. The Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM). World Englishes, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12534