WhatsApp Chat Corpus: 60 Dutch Conversations from 2013-2015

60 WhatsApp chat sessions collected by master students at Radboud University Nijmegen between 2013 and 2015. All participants are over 18 and provided consent, with conversations anonymized for research. The corpus was archived in 2018 for the CLARIAH-sponsored ACAD project and includes metadata in CMDI XML files.

Use Cases

• Analyzing conversational patterns in informal digital communication based on the chat session structure.
• Studying the evolution of language use in social media based on conversations collected over two academic years.
• Developing or benchmarking NLP models for Dutch chat text based on the annotated Folia XML format.

Strengths

• Contains 60 distinct WhatsApp chat sessions, providing a substantial sample of informal communication.
• All data is ethically sourced with explicit consent from over-18 participants and is anonymized.
• Includes per-conversation metadata in CMDI XML files and timestamps in Folia XML files.

Limitations

• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale projects.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The data is from a specific time period (2013-2015) and student population, which may limit generalizability.

Provenance

Source

Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Arts, originally collected by Manon Berntzen for a course and bachelor thesis.

Collection Method

Collected by master students in Communication & Information Studies as part of academic work.

Time Range

2013-2015

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; the corpus was first archived in October 2018.