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One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections consisting of ~ 3.5 billion words or ~ 9.0 billion characters and covering 2069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of what we call average prediction complexity. We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. In addition, we show that speaker population size predicts entropy. We argue that both results constitute evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective.
The Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012 seqq.) serves as an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, synthesizing an increasing number of lexicographical dictionaries and providing basic cross-resource search options. The paper discusses the far-reaching revision of the system’s conceptual, lexicographical and technological underpinnings currently under way, focussing on their relevance for multilingual loanword lexicography.
In this paper we present an experimental semantic search function, based on word embeddings, for an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWPD). The LWPD synthesizes an increasing number of lexicographical resources and provides basic cross-resource search options. Onomasiological access to the lexical units of the portal is a highly desirable feature for many research questions, such as the likelihood of borrowing lexical units with a given meaning (Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009; Zeller, 2015). The search technology is based on multilingual pre-trained word embeddings, and individual word senses in the portal are associated with word vectors. Users may select one or more among a very large number of search terms, and the database returns lexical items with word sense vectors similar to these terms. We give a preliminary assessment of the feasibility, usability and efficacy of our approach, in particular in comparison to search options based on semantic domains or fields.
The web portal Lehnwortportal Deutsch (lwp.ids-mannheim.de), developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS), aims to provide unified access to existing and possibly new dictionaries of German loanwords in other languages. Internally, the lexicographical information is represented as a directed acyclic graph of relations between words. The graph abstracts from the idiosyncrasies of the individual component dictionaries. This paper explores two different strategies to make complex graph-based cross-dictionary queries in such a portal more accessible to users. The first strategy effectively hides the underlying graph structure, but allows users to assign scopes (internally defined in terms of the graph structure) to search criteria. A second type of search strategy directly formulates queries in terms of the relational graph structure. In this case, search results are not entries but n-tuples of words (metalemmata, loanwords, etyma); a query consists of specifying properties of these words and relations between them. A working prototype of an easy-to-use human-readable declarative query language is presented and ways to interactively construct queries are discussed.
This paper presents a dictionary writing system developed at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (IDS) for an ongoing international lexicographical project that traces the way of German loanwords in the East Slavic languages Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian that were possibly borrowed via Polish. The results will be published in the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWP, lwp.ids-mannheim.de), a web portal for loanword dictionaries with German as the common donor language. The system described here is currently in use for excerpting data from a large range of historical and contemporary East Slavic monolingual dictionaries. The paper focuses on the tools that help in merging excerpts that are etymologically related to one and the same Polish etymon. The merging process involves eliminating redundancies and inconsistencies and, above all, mapping word senses of excerpted entries onto a common cross-language set of ‘metasenses’. This mapping may involve literally hundreds of excerpted East Slavic word senses, including quotations, for one ‘underlying’ Polish etymon.
This paper reports on an ongoing international project of compiling a freely accessible online Dictionary of German Loans in Polish Dialects. The dictionary will be the first comprehensive lexicographic compendium of its kind, serving as a complement to existing resources on German lexical loans in the literary or standard language. The empirical results obtained in the project will shed new light on the distribution of German loanwords among different dialects, also in comparison to the well-documented situation in written Polish. The dictionary will have a strong focus on the dialectal distribution of Polish dialectal variants for a given German etymon, accessible through interactive cartographic representations and corresponding search options. The editorial process is realized with dedicated collaborative web tools. The new resource will be published as an integrated part of an online information system for German lexical borrowings in other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, and is therefore highly cross-linked with other loanword dictionaries on Polish as well as Slavic and further European languages.
The representation of semantic relations between word senses of different entries in a dictionary is subject to a number of consistency requirements. This paper discusses the issue of maintaining and accessing consistent information on cross-references between sense-related items in electronic dictionaries from a mainly text-technological point of view. We present a number of consistency criteria for cross-referencing related senses and propose a practical approach to handling sense relations in an online dictionary. Our proposal is currently being tested in a large ongoing online dictionary project for German called elexiko. We focus on three different aspects of the dictionary development and editing process where consistency is an important issue: lexicographic data modelling, implementation of a lexicographic database system for an electronic dictionary, and development of practical tools for the lexicographer’s workbench.
The web portal Lehnwortportal Deutsch <lwp.ids-mannheim.de>, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS), aims to provide unified access to a growing number of lexicographical resources on German loanwords in other languages. This paper discusses different possibilities of creating an onomasiological access structure for portal users. We critically examine the meaning list of the “World Loanword Database” project (Haspelmath/Tadmor 2009a) as well as WordNet-based taxonomies and propose a new way of inductively creating a semantic classification scheme that takes both hyperonymic relations and semantic fields into account. We show how such a classification can be integrated into the underlying graph-based data representation of the Lehnwortportal and thus be exploited for advanced onomasiological search options.