Refine
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (2)
- Article (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (4)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (4)
Keywords
- Korpus <Linguistik> (4) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (2)
- Postprint (1)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (2)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (1)
Publisher
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.
We start by trying to answer a question that has already been asked by de Schryver et al. (2006): Do dictionary users (frequently) look up words that are frequent in a corpus. Contrary to their results, our results that are based on the analysis of log files from two different online dictionaries indicate that users indeed look up frequent words frequently. When combining frequency information from the Mannheim German Reference Corpus and information about the number of visits in the Digital Dictionary of the German Language as well as the German language edition of Wiktionary, a clear connection between corpus and look-up frequencies can be observed. In a follow-up study, we show that another important factor for the look-up frequency of a word is its temporal social relevance. To make this effect visible, we propose a de-trending method where we control both frequency effects and overall look-up trends.
Gerd Hentschel gehört zu den Pionieren der heutigen Computerlexikografie und der IT-gestützten Korpuserschließung. Eine seiner ersten Zeitschriftenpublikationen, mit dem Titel Einsatz von EDV und Mikrocomputer in einem lexikographischen Forschungsprojekt zum deutschen Lehnwort im Polnischen (Hentschel 1983), befasst sich mit der Frage, wie - unter den damaligen technischen Vorzeichen - Forschungs- und Dokumentationsarbeiten zu polnischen Germanismen sinnvoll durch die Verwendung von Computern unterstützt werden können. Die besagten Arbeiten mündeten später in die Online-Publikation des Wörterbuchs der deutschen Lehnwörter in der polnischen Schrift- und Standardsprache (WDLP). Es ist aus heutiger Sicht bemerkenswert, mit welchen Beschränkungen die Arbeit mit dem Computer noch vor 40 Jahren zu kämpfen hatte. Aus gegebenem Anlass sei es gestattet, diesen Punkt etwas ausführlicher zu illustrieren.
Making 1:n explorable: a search interface for the ZAS database of clause-embedding predicates
(2017)
We introduce a recently published corpus-based database of German clause-embedding predicates and present an innovative web application for exploring it. The application displays the predicates and the corpus examples for these predicates in two separate tables that can be browsed and searched in real time. While familiar web interface paradigms make it easy for users to get started, the data presentation and the interactive advanced search components for the two tables are designed to accommodate remarkably complex query needs without the need for resorting to a dedicated query language or a more specialized tool. The 1:n relationship between predicates and their examples is exploited in the two tables in that, e.g. the predicate table also shows, for each predicate and each example attribute, all values that occur in the examples for this predicate. An easy-to-use visual query builder for arbitrary Boolean combinations of search criteria can optionally be displayed to pre-filter the underlying data presented in both tables. Several options for altering quantifier scope can be activated with simple checkboxes and considerably widen the space of searchable constellations.