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In this paper, we introduce the Swiss-AL workbench, an online tool for corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The workbench enables the analysis of Swiss-AL, a multilingual Swiss web corpus with sources from media, politics, industry, science, and civil society. The workbench differs from other corpus analysis tools in three characteristics: (1) easy access and tidy interface, (2) focus on visualizations, and (3) wide range of analysis options, ranging from classic corpus linguistic analysis (e.g., collocation analysis) to more recent NLP approaches (topic modeling and word embeddings). It is designed for researchers of various disciplines, practitioners, and students., OASIcs, Vol. 93, 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2021), pages 26:1-26:9

The Swiss Web Corpus for Applied Linguistics (Swiss-AL) is a multilingual (German, French, Italian) collection of texts from selected web sources. Unlike most other web corpora it is not intended for NLP purposes, but rather designed to support data-based and data-driven research on societal and political discourses in Switzerland. It currently contains 8 million texts (approx. 1.55 billion tokens), including news and specialist publications, governmental opinions, and parliamentary records, web sites of political parties, companies, and universities, statements from industry associations and NGOs, etc. A flexible processing pipeline using state-of-the-art components allows researchers in applied linguistics to create tailor-made subcorpora for studying discourse in a wide range of domains. So far, Swiss-AL has been used successfully in research on Swiss public discourses on energy and on antibiotic resistance.