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Für die spezifischen Bedürfnisse der Schreibbeobachtung wurde das Orthografische Kernkorpus (OKK) als virtuelles Korpus in DeReKo entwickelt. Mit derzeit rund 14 Mrd. Token deckt es den Schriftsprachgebrauch in den deutschsprachigen Ländern im Zeitraum von 1995 bis in die Gegenwart ab. Der Zugriff über die Korpusanalyseplattform KorAP erlaubt nicht nur die Nutzung verschiedener Annotationen, sondern über die API-Schnittstellen auch die Einbindung in diverse Auswertungsumgebungen wie RStudio über den RKorAPClient und macht es so für zahlreiche Analyse- und Visualisierungsmöglichkeiten zugänglich.
It is well known that the distribution of lexical and grammatical patterns is size- and register-sensitive (Biber 1986, and later publications). This fact alone presents a challenge to many corpus-oriented linguistic studies focusing on a single language. When it comes to cross-linguistic studies using corpora, the challenge becomes even greater due to the lack of high-quality multilingual corpora (Kupietz et al. 2020; Kupietz/Trawiński 2022), which are comparable with respect to the size and the register. That was the motivation for the creation of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an initiative started in 2013 at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) together with several European partners (Kupietz et al. 2020). EuReCo is an emerging federated corpus, with large virtual comparable corpora across various languages and with an infrastructure supporting contrastive research. The core of the infrastructure is KorAP (Diewald et al. 2016), a scalable open-source platform supporting the analysis and visualisation of properties of texts annotated by multiple and potentially conflicting information layers, and supporting several corpus query languages. Until recently, EuReCo consisted of three monolingual subparts: the German Reference Corpus DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2018), the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (Barbu Mititelu/Tufiş/Irimia 2018), and the Hungarian National Corpus (Váradi 2002). The goal of the present submission is twofold. On the one hand, it reports about the new component of EuReCo: a sample of the National Corpus of Polish (Przepiórkowski et al. 2010). On the other hand, it presents the results of a new pilot study using the newly extended EuReCo. This pilot study investigates selected Polish collocations involving light verbs and their prepositional / nominal complements (Fig. 1) and extends the collocation analyses of German, Romanian and Hungarian (Fig. 2) discussed in Kupietz/Trawiński (2022).
The International Comparable Corpus (ICC) (Kirk/Čermáková 2017; Čermáková et al. 2021) is an open initiative which aims to improve the empirical basis for contrastive linguistics by compiling comparable corpora for many languages and making them as freely available as possible as well as providing tools with which they can easily be queried and analysed. In this contribution we present the first release of written language parts of the ICC which includes corpora for Chinese, Czech, English, German, Irish (partly), and Norwegian. Each of the released corpora contains 400k words distributed over 14 different text categories according to the ICC specifications. Our poster covers the design basics of the ICC, its TEI encoding, a demonstration of using the ICC via different query tools, and an outlook on future plans.
Similar to the European Reference Corpus EuReCo (Kupietz et al. 2020), ICC follows the approach of reusing existing linguistic resources wherever possible in order to cover as many languages as possible with realistic effort in as short a time as possible. In contrast to EuReCo, however, comparable corpus pairs are not defined dynamically in the usage phase, but the compositions of the corpora are fixed in the ICC design. The approaches are thus complementary in this respect. The design principles and composition of the ICC are based on those of the International Corpus of English (ICE) (Greenbaum (ed.) 1996), with the deviation that the ICC includes the additional text category blog post and excludes spoken legal texts (see Čermáková et al. 2021 for details). ICC’s fixed-design approach has the advantage that all single-language corpora in the ICC have the same composition with respect to the selected text types and that this guarantees that the selected broad spectrum of potential influencing variables for linguistic variation is always represented. The disadvantage, however, is that this can only be achieved for quite small corpora and that the generalisability of comparative findings based on the ICC corpora will often need to be checked on larger monolingual corpora or translation corpora (Čermáková/Ebeling/Oksefjell Ebeling forthcoming). Arguing that such issues with comparability and representativeness are inevitable, in one way or the other, and need to be dealt with, our poster will discuss and exemplify the text selections in more detail.
Einleitung
(2023)
We introduce DeReKoGram, a novel frequency dataset containing lemma and part-of-speech (POS) information for 1-, 2-, and 3-grams from the German Reference Corpus. The dataset contains information based on a corpus of 43.2 billion tokens and is divided into 16 parts based on 16 corpus folds. We describe how the dataset was created and structured. By evaluating the distribution over the 16 folds, we show that it is possible to work with a subset of the folds in many use cases (e.g., to save computational resources). In a case study, we investigate the growth of vocabulary (as well as the number of hapax legomena) as an increasing number of folds are included in the analysis. We cross-combine this with the various cleaning stages of the dataset. We also give some guidance in the form of Python, R, and Stata markdown scripts on how to work with the resource.
Der Beitrag betrachtet das Deutsche Referenzkorpus DeReKo in Bezug auf Strategien für seinen Ausbau, den Zugriff über die Korpusanalyseplattform KorAP und seine Einbettung in Forschungsinfrastrukturen und in die deutschsprachige und europäische Korpuslandschaft. Ausgehend von dieser Bestandsaufnahme werden Perspektiven zu seiner Weiterentwicklung aufgezeigt. Zu den Zukunftsvisionen gehören die Verteilung von Korpussressourcen und die Konstruktion multilingualer vergleichbarer Korpora anhand der Bestände der National- und Referenzkorpora, eine Plattform zur Abgabe und Aufbereitung von Sprachspenden als eine Anwendung von Citizen Science sowie eine Komponente zur automatischen Identifikation von übersetzten bzw. maschinenverfassten Texten.
In order to differentiate between figurative and literal usage of verb-noun combinations for the shared task on the disambiguation of German Verbal Idioms issued for KONVENS 2021, we apply and extend an approach originally developed for detecting idioms in a dataset consisting of random ngram samples. The classification is done by implementing a rather shallow, statistics-based pipeline without intensive preprocessing and examinations on the morphosyntactic and semantic level. We describe the overall approach, the differences between the original dataset and the dataset of the KONVENS task, provide experimental classification results, and analyse the individual contributions of our feature sets.
This paper reports on recent developments within the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an open initiative that aims at providing and using virtual and dynamically definable comparable corpora based on existing national, reference or other large corpora. Given the well-known shortcomings of other types of multilingual corpora such as parallel/translation corpora (shining-through effects, over-normalization, simplification, etc.) or web-based comparable corpora (covering only web material), EuReCo provides a unique linguistic resource offering new perspectives for fine-grained contrastive research on authentic cross-linguistic data, applications in translation studies and foreign language teaching and learning.
Einleitung
(2023)
Das Deutsche Referenzkorpus DeReKo dient als eine empirische Grundlage für die germanistische Linguistik. In diesem Beitrag geben wir einen Überblick über Grundlagen und Neuigkeiten zu DeReKo und seine Verwendungsmöglichkeiten sowie einen Einblick in seine strategische Gesamtkonzeption, die zum Ziel hat, DeReKo trotz begrenzter Ressourcen für einerseits möglichst viele und andererseits auch für innovative und anspruchsvolle Anwendungen nutzbar zu machen. Insbesondere erläutern wir dabei Strategien zur Aufbereitung sehr großer Korpora mit notwendigerweise heuristischen Verfahren und Herausforderungen, die sich auf dem Weg zur linguistischen Erschließung solcher Korpora stellen.
Dieser Beitrag beschreibt die Motivation und Ziele hinter der Initiative Europäisches Referenzkorpus EuReCo. Ausgehend von den Desiderata, die sich aufgrund der Defizite verfügbarer Forschungsdaten wie monolinguale Korpora, Parallelkorpora und Vergleichskorpora für den Sprachvergleich ergeben, werden die bisherigen und die laufenden Arbeiten im Rahmen von EuReCo präsentiert und anhand vergleichender deutsch-rumänischer Kookkurrenzanalysen neue Perspektiven für kontrastive Korpuslinguistik, die die EuReCo-Initiative öffnet, skizziert.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state of the art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
Enabling appropriate access to linguistic research data, both for many researchers and for innovative research applications, is a challenging task. In this chapter, we describe how we address this challenge in the context of the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the corpus analysis platform KorAP. The core of our approach, which is based on and tightly integrated into the CLARIN infrastructure, is to offer access at different levels. The graduated access levels make it possible to find a low-loss compromise between the possibilities opened up and the costs incurred by users and providers for each individual use case, so that, viewed over many applications, the ratio between effort and results achieved can be effectively optimized. We also report on experiences with the current state of this approach.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state-ofthe-art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
We present the use of count-based and predictive language models for exploring language use in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. For collocation analysis along the syntagmatic axis we employ traditional association measures based on co-occurrence counts as well as predictive association measures derived from the output weights of skipgram word embeddings. For inspecting the semantic neighbourhood of words along the paradigmatic axis we visualize the high dimensional word embeddings in two dimensions using t-stochastic neighbourhood embeddings. Together, these visualizations provide a complementary, explorative approach to analysing very large corpora in addition to corpus querying. Moreover, we discuss count-based and predictive models w.r.t. scalability and maintainability in very large corpora.
In a recent article, Meylan and Griffiths (Meylan & Griffiths, 2021, henceforth, M&G) focus their attention on the significant methodological challenges that can arise when using large-scale linguistic corpora. To this end, M&G revisit a well-known result of Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (2011, henceforth, PT&G) who argue that average information content is a better predictor of word length than word frequency. We applaud M&G who conducted a very important study that should be read by any researcher interested in working with large-scale corpora. The fact that M&G mostly failed to find clear evidence in favor of PT&G's main finding motivated us to test PT&G's idea on a subset of the largest archive of German language texts designed for linguistic research, the German Reference Corpus consisting of ∼43 billion words. We only find very little support for the primary data point reported by PT&G.
Twitter data is used in a wide variety of research disciplines in Social Sciences and Humanities. Although most Twitter data is publicly available, its re-use and sharing raise many legal questions related to intellectual property and personal data protection. Moreover, the use of Twitter and its content is subject to the Terms of Service, which also regulate re-use and sharing. This extended abstract provides a brief analysis of these issues and introduces the new Academic Research product track, which enables authorized researchers to access Twitter API on a preferential basis.
The automatic recognition of idioms poses a challenging problem for NLP applications. Whereas native speakers can intuitively handle multiword expressions whose compositional meanings are hard to trace back to individual word semantics, there is still ample scope for improvement regarding computational approaches. We assume that idiomatic constructions can be characterized by gradual intensities of semantic non-compositionality, formal fixedness, and unusual usage context, and introduce a number of measures for these characteristics, comprising count-based and predictive collocation measures together with measures of context (un)similarity. We evaluate our approach on a manually labelled gold standard, derived from a corpus of German pop lyrics. To this end, we apply a Random Forest classifier to analyze the individual contribution of features for automatically detecting idioms, and study the trade-off between recall and precision. Finally, we evaluate the classifier on an independent dataset of idioms extracted from a list of Wikipedia idioms, achieving state-of-the art accuracy.
This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on the International Corpus of English (ICE). As such, ICC will contain approximately the same balance of forty percent of written language and 60 percent of spoken language distributed across 27 different text types and contexts. A number of issues encountered by the project teams are discussed, ranging from copyright and data sustainability to technical advances in data distribution.
In this paper, we present our experiences and decisions in dealing with challenges in developing, maintaining and operating online research software tools in the field of linguistics. In particular, we highlight reproducibility, dependability, and security as important aspects of quality management – taking into account the special circumstances in which research software
is usually created.
Die Korpusanalyseplattform KorAP ist von Grund auf sprachenunabhängig konzipiert. Dies gilt sowohl in Bezug auf die Lokalisierung der Benutzeroberfläche als auch hinsichtlich unterschiedlicher Anfragesprachen und der Unterstützung fremdsprachiger Korpora und ihren Annotationen. Diese Eigenschaften dienen im Rahmen der EuReCo Initiative aktuell besonders der Bereitstellung weiterer National- und Referenzkorpora neben DeReKo. EuReCo versucht, Kompetenzen beim Aufbau großer Korpora zu bündeln und durch die Verfügbarmachung vergleichbarer Korpora quantitative Sprachvergleichsforschung zu erleichtern. Hierzu bietet KorAP inzwischen, neben dem Zugang durch die Benutzeroberfläche, einen Web API Client an, der statistische Erhebungen, auch korpusübergreifend, vereinfacht.
Der Beitrag beschreibt die Motivation und Ziele des Europäischen Referenzkorpus EuReCo, einer offenen Initiative, die darauf abzielt, dynamisch definierbare virtuelle vergleichbare Korpora auf der Grundlage bestehender nationaler, Referenz- oder anderer großer Korpora bereitzustellen und zu verwenden. Angesichts der bekannten Unzulänglichkeiten anderer Arten mehrsprachiger Korpora wie Parallel- bzw. Übersetzungskorpora oder rein webbasierte vergleichbare Korpora, stellt das EuReCo eine einzigartige linguistische Ressource dar, die neue Perspektiven für germanistische und vergleichende wie angewandte Korpuslinguistik, insbesondere im europäischen Kontext, eröffnet.
Die Korpusanalyseplattform KorAP wird als Nachfolgesystem zu COSMAS II am Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) entwickelt und erlaubt einen umfassenden Zugriff auf einen Teil von DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2010). Trotz einiger noch fehlender Funktionalitäten ist KorAP bereits produktiv einsetzbar. Im Folgenden wollen wir am Beispiel der Untersuchung von Social-Media-Korpora einige neue Möglichkeiten und Besonderheiten vorstellen.
Making corpora accessible and usable for linguistic research is a huge challenge in view of (too) big data, legal issues and a rapidly evolving methodology. This does not only affect the design of user-friendly graphical interfaces to corpus analysis tools, but also the availability of programming interfaces supporting access to the functionality of these tools from various analysis and development environments. RKorAPClient is a new research tool in the form of an R package that interacts with the Web API of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, which provides access to large annotated corpora, including the German reference corpus DeReKo with 45 billion tokens. In addition to optionally authenticated KorAP API access, RKorAPClient provides further processing and visualization features to simplify common corpus analysis tasks. This paper introduces the basic functionality of RKorAPClient and exemplifies various analysis tasks based on DeReKo, that are bundled within the R package and can serve as a basic framework for advanced analysis and visualization approaches.
We evaluate a graph-based dependency parser on DeReKo, a large corpus of contemporary German. The dependency parser is trained on the German dataset from the SPMRL 2014 Shared Task which contains text from the news domain, whereas DeReKo also covers other domains including fiction, science, and technology. To avoid the need for costly manual annotation of the corpus, we use the parser’s probability estimates for unlabeled and labeled attachment as main evaluation criterion. We show that these probability estimates are highly correlated with the actual attachment scores on a manually annotated test set. On this basis, we compare estimated parsing scores for the individual domains in DeReKo, and show that the scores decrease with increasing distance of a domain to the training corpus.
This paper addresses long-term archival for large corpora. Three aspects specific to language resources are focused, namely (1) the removal of resources for legal reasons, (2) versioning of (unchanged) objects in constantly growing resources, especially where objects can be part of multiple releases but also part of different collections, and (3) the conversion of data to new formats for digital preservation. It is motivated why language resources may have to be changed, and why formats may need to be converted. As a solution, the use of an intermediate proxy object called a signpost is suggested. The approach will be exemplified with respect to the corpora of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, namely the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and the Archive for Spoken German (AGD).
Der Beitrag untersucht vorhandene Lösungen und neue Möglichkeiten des Korpusausbaus aus Social Media- und internetbasierter Kommunikation (IBK) für das Deutsche Referenzkorpus (DEREKO). DEREKO ist eine Sammlung gegenwartssprachlicher Schriftkorpora am IDS, die der sprachwissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit über die Korpusschnittstellen COSMAS II und KorAP angeboten wird. Anhand von Definitionen und Beispielen gehen wir zunächst auf die Extensionen und Überlappungen der Konzepte Social Media, Internetbasierte Kommunikation und Computer-mediated Communication ein. Wir betrachten die rechtlichen Voraussetzungen für einen Korpusausbau aus Sozialen Medien, die sich aus dem kürzlich in relevanten Punkten reformierten deutschen Urheberrecht, aus Persönlichkeitsrechten wie der europäischen Datenschutz-Grundverordnung ergeben und stellen Konsequenzen sowie mögliche und tatsächliche Umsetzungen dar. Der Aufbau von Social Media-Korpora in großen Textmengen unterliegt außerdem korpustechnologischen Herausforderungen, die für traditionelle Schriftkorpora als gelöst galten oder gar nicht erst bestanden. Wir berichten, wie Fragen der Datenaufbereitung, des Korpus-Encoding, der Anonymisierung oder der linguistischen Annotation von Social Media Korpora für DEREKO angegangen wurden und welche Herausforderungen noch bestehen. Wir betrachten die Korpuslandschaft verfügbarer deutschsprachiger IBK- und Social Media-Korpora und geben einen Überblick über den Bestand an IBK- und Social Media-Korpora und ihre Charakteristika (Chat-, Wiki Talk- und Forenkorpora) in DEREKO sowie von laufenden Projekten in diesem Bereich. Anhand korpuslinguistischer Mikro- und Makro-Analysen von Wikipedia-Diskussionen im Vergleich mit dem Gesamtbestand von DEREKO zeigen wir charakterisierende sprachliche Eigenschaften von Wikipedia-Diskussionen auf und bewerten ihren Status als Repräsentant von IBK-Korpora.
The DRuKoLA project
(2019)
DRuKoLA, the accompanying project in the making of the Corpus of Romanian Language, is a cooperation between German and Romanian computer scientists, corpus linguists and linguists, aiming at linking reference corpora of European languages under one corpus analysis tool able to manage big data. KorAP, the analysis tool developed at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (Mannheim), is being tailored for the Romanian language in a first attempt to reunite reference corpora under the EuReCo initiative, detailed in this paper. The paper describes the necessary steps of harmonization within KorAP and the corpus of Romanian language and discusses, as one important goal of this project, criteria and ways to build virtual comparable corpora to be used for contrastive linguistic analyses.
The user interfaces for corpus analysis platforms must provide a high degree of accessibility for ordinary users and at the same time provide the possibility to answer complex research questions. In this paper, we present the design concepts behind the user interface of KorAP, a corpus analysis platform that has evolved into the main gateway to CoRoLa, the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language. Based on established principles of user interface design, we show how KorAP addresses the challenge of providing a user-friendly interface for heterogeneous corpus data to a wide range of users with different research questions.
Introduction
(2019)
This paper reports on the latest developments of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo and the German Reference Corpus in relation to three of the most important CMLC topics: interoperability, collaboration on corpus infrastructure building, and legal issues. Concerning interoperability, we present new ways to access DeReKo via KorAP on the API and on the plugin level. In addition we report about advancements in the EuReCo- and ICC-initiatives with the provision of comparable corpora, and about recent problems with license acquisitions and our solution approaches using an indemnification clause and model licenses that include scientific exploitation.
Distributional models of word use constitute an indispensable tool in corpus based lexicological research for discovering paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic patterns (Belica et al. 2010). Recently, word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) have revived the field by allowing to construct and analyze distributional models on very large corpora. This is accomplished by reducing the very high dimensionality of word cooccurrence contexts, the size of the vocabulary, to few dimensions, such as 100-200. However, word use and meaning can vary widely along dimensions such as domain, register, and time, and word embeddings tend to represent only the most prevalent meaning. In this paper we thus construct domain specific word embeddings to allow for systematically analyzing variations in word use. Moreover, we also demonstrate how to reconstruct domain specific co-occurrence contexts from the dense word embeddings.
Neues von KorAP
(2019)
Korpuslinguistik
(2012)
This presentation introduces a new collaborative project: the International Comparable Corpus (ICC) (https://korpus.cz/icc), to be compiled from European national, standard(ised) languages, using the protocols for text categories and their quantities of texts in the International Corpus of English (ICE).
Das Phänomen Sprache ist in Form des beobachtbaren Sprachgebrauchs fast allgegenwärtig, gleichzeitig bleibt das offenkundig Regel- und Systemhafte dieses Phänomens überraschend ungreifbar. Wegen der überwältigenden Komplexität natürlicher Sprachen entsteht bei jedem Versuch, dieses Systemhafte in einer Theorie mit explanatorischem Anspruch zu fassen, eine breite Kluft zwischen der angestrebten theoretischen Beschreibungsebene einerseits und der phänomenologisch zugänglichen Ebene des Sprachgebrauchs andererseits.
Ausgehend von allgemeinen wissenschaftstheoretischen Überlegungen, wie man angesichts dieser Kluft überhaupt zu hinreichend abgesicherten Erkenntnissen für eine explanatorische Theoriebildung kommen kann, betonen die Autoren die Notwendigkeit, sich dem Untersuchungsgegenstand Sprache mit möglichst wenigen Vorannahmen über diesen Gegenstand selbst zu nähern und sich dabei konsequent von der Empirie leiten zu lassen. Sie werben nachdrücklich für eine emergentistische Perspektive auf Sprache, der zufolge alles Regelhafte und Konventionelle in der Sprache ein Epiphänomen des Sprachgebrauchs ist und von den Sprachteilnehmern fortlaufend ausgehandelt wird. Eine treibende Kraft hierbei ist, so wird argumentiert, der Begriff der Ähnlichkeit. Auf dieser Grundlage wird schließlich ein Forschungsprogramm entworfen, das die Wirkung des Faktors Ähnlichkeit auf die Sprache nachzuzeichnen und dadurch schrittweise zu ähnlichen Generalisierungen zu gelangen versucht wie die Sprachgemeinschaft.
Einleitung
(2018)
Das hier vorgeführte Schienenbild ist das in Anlehnung an Wittenburg (2009) als Erweiterungsinstrument gewählte Mittel in dem Versuch, Computertechnologie, linguistische Forschung und Vernetzung am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in deren rasch wachsenden Vielschichtigkeit zu beschreiben. Hier werden u. a. drei Blickwinkel, der des Technologie entwickelnden Wissenschaftlers, des entwickelnden Nutzers und des Nutzers von Informationstechnologie in der linguistischen Forschung vereint und um eine für den Sprachvergleich neue Dimension, die sprachspezifische Parameter von Analyseinstrumenten miteinander harmonisiert, erweitert.
This paper discusses current trends in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus, concerning legal issues around the recent German copyright reform with positive implications for corpus building and corpus linguistics in general, recent corpus extensions in the genres of popular magazines, journals, historical texts, and web-based football reports. Besides, DeReKo is finally accessible via the new
corpus research platform KorAP, offering registered users several news features in comparison with its predecessor COSMAS II.
Sehr große Korpora – wie das Deutsche Referenzkorpus DeReKo – bieten eine breite Basis für die empirische Forschung. Sie bringen aber auch Herausforderungen mit sich, da sich weder Eigenschaften ihrer Zusammensetzung noch derer von Recherche- und Analyseergebnissen mit einfachen Mitteln erschließen lassen. Dafür bedarf es Verfahren geschickter Sortierung, Gruppierung oder des Clusterings, kurzum: strukturentdeckender Methoden. In Kombination mit Visualisierungstechniken kann so die Wahrnehmung bestimmter Eigenschaften und Zusammenhänge unterstützt und die Aufmerksamkeit auf bestimmte Phänomene, ggf. in Anlehnung an präferenzrelationale Befunde, gelenkt werden. Neben der illustrativen Funktion geht es in diesem Beitrag vor allem um das erkenntnisleitende Potenzial derartiger Verfahren in Kombination. Aus verschiedenen Bereichen werden Beispiele gezeigt, die am IDS oder in Kooperationen zum Einsatz kommen, sowohl zur dokumentarischen und reflexiven Kontrolle von Eigenschaften der Korpuszusammensetzung als auch hinsichtlich korpusanalytischer Methodik, um die qualitative Interpretation von Analysebefunden und die Abduktion von Hypothesen stimulierend zu unterstützen.
Einleitung
(2018)
CMC Corpora in DeReKo
(2017)
We introduce three types of corpora of computer-mediated communication that have recently been compiled at the Institute for the German Language or curated from an external project and included in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus, namely Wikipedia (discussion) corpora, the Usenet news corpus, and the Dortmund Chat Corpus. The data and corpora have been converted to I5, the TEI customization to represent texts in DeReKo, and are researchable via the web-based IDS corpus research interfaces and in the case of Wikipedia and chat also downloadable from the IDS repository and download server, respectively.
Taking a usage-based perspective, lexical-semantic relations and other aspects of lexical meaning are characterised as emerging from language use. At the same time, they shape language use and therefore become manifest in corpus data. This paper discusses how this mutual influence can be taken into account in the study of these relations. An empirically driven methodology is proposed that is, as an initial step, based on self-organising clustering of comprehensive collocation profiles. Several examples demonstrate how this methodology may guide linguists in explicating implicit knowledge of complex semantic structures. Although these example analyses are conducted for written German, the overall methodology is language-independent.
Editorial
(2016)
KorAP, die neue Korpusanalyseplattform des IDS, die COSMAS II im Laufe der kommenden 2–3 Jahre ablösen wird, bietet gerade zur Erforschung grammatischer Variation einige besondere Funktionalitäten. Grundlegend ist beispielsweise, dass KorAP die Repräsentation und Abfrage beliebiger und beliebig vieler Annotationsschichten, zum Beispiel zu Konstituenz- und Dependenzrelationen, unterstutzt und damit die Suche nach speziellen grammatischen Phänomenen erleichtert oder erst möglich macht. Darüber hinaus unterstutzt KorAP die Konstruktion virtueller Korpora anhand von Metadatenvariablen und erleichtert damit kontrastive Untersuchungen. Der vorliegende Artikel erläutert die für die grammatische Variationsforschung relevanten KorAP-Funktionalitäten im Einzelnen und gibt einen Einblick in ihre Grundlagen.
This paper introduces the recently started DRuKoLA-project that aims at providing mechanisms to flexibly draw virtual comparable corpora from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language CoRoLa in order to use these virtual corpora as empirical basis for contrastive linguistic research.
Constructing a Corpus
(2016)
KorAP is a corpus search and analysis platform, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). It supports very large corpora with multiple annotation layers, multiple query languages, and complex licensing scenarios. KorAP’s design aims to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable to serve the German Reference Corpus DEREKO for at least the next decade. To meet these requirements, we have adopted a highly modular microservice-based architecture. This paper outlines our approach: An architecture consisting of small components that are easy to extend, replace, and maintain. The components include a search backend, a user and corpus license management system, and a web-based user frontend. We also describe a general corpus query protocol used by all microservices for internal communications. KorAP is open source, licensed under BSD-2, and available on GitHub.
This paper presents ongoing research which is embedded in an empirical-linguistic research program, set out to devise viable research strategies for developing an explanatory theory of grammar as a psychological and social phenomenon. As this phenomenon cannot be studied directly, the program attempts to approach it indirectly through its correlates in language corpora, which is justified by referring to the core tenets of Emergent Grammar. The guiding principle for identifying such corpus correlates of grammatical regularities is to imitate the psychological processes underlying the emergent nature of these regularities. While previous work in this program focused on syntagmatic structures, the current paper goes one step further by investigating schematic structures that involve paradigmatic variation. It introduces and explores a general strategy by which corpus correlates of such structures may be uncovered, and it further outlines how these correlates may be used to study the nature of the psychologically real schematic structures.
Igel is a small XQuery-based web application for examining a collection of document grammars; in particular, for comparing related document grammars to get a better overview of their differences and similarities. In its initial form, Igel reads only DTDs and provides only simple lists of constructs in them (elements, attributes, notations, parameter entities). Our continuing work is aimed at making Igel provide more sophisticated and useful information about document grammars and building the application into a useful tool for the analysis (and the maintenance!) of families of related document grammars
Empirical synchronic language studies generally seek to investigate language phenomena for one point in time, even though this point in time is often not stated explicitly. Until today, surprisingly little research has addressed the implications of this time-dependency of synchronic research on the composition and analysis of data that are suitable for conducting such studies. Existing solutions and practices tend to be too general to meet the needs of all kinds of research questions. In this theoretical paper that is targeted at both corpus creators and corpus users, we propose to take a decidedly synchronic perspective on the relevant language data. Such a perspective may be realised either in terms of sampling criteria or in terms of analytical methods applied to the data. As a general approach for both realisations, we introduce and explore the FReD strategy (Frequency Relevance Decay) which models the relevance of language events from a synchronic perspective. This general strategy represents a whole family of synchronic perspectives that may be customised to meet the requirements imposed by the specific research questions and language domain under investigation.
This paper describes the efforts in the field of sustainability of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim with respect to DEREKO (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German. With focus on re-usability and sustainability, we discuss its history and our future plans. We describe legal challenges related to the creation of a large and sustainable resource; sketch out the pipeline used to convert raw texts to the final corpus format and outline migration plans to TEI P5. Due to the fact, that the current version of the corpus management and query system is pushed towards its limits, we discuss the requirements for a new version which will be able to handle current and future DEREKO releases. Furthermore, we outline the institute’s plans in the field of digital preservation.
The paper discusses from various angles the morphosyntactic annotation of DeReKo, the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part covers the practical and technical aspects of this endeavor. We present results from a recent evaluation of tools for the annotation of German text resources that have been applied to DeReKo. These tools include commercial products, especially Xerox' Finite State Tools and the Machinese products developed by the Finnish company Connexor Oy, as well as software for which academic licenses are available free of charge for academic institutions, e.g. Helmut Schmid's Tree Tagger. The second part focuses on the linguistic interpretability of the corpus annotations and more general methodological considerations concerning scientifically sound empirical linguistic research. The main challenge here is that unlike the texts themselves, the morphosyntactic annotations of DeReKo do not have the status of observed data; instead they constitute a theory and implementation-dependent interpretation. In addition, because of the enormous size of DeReKo, a systematic manual verification of the automatic annotations is not feasible. In consequence, the expected degree of inaccuracy is very high, particularly wherever linguistically challenging phenomena, such as lexical or grammatical variation, are concerned. Given these facts, a researcher using the annotations blindly will run the risk of not actually studying the language but rather the annotation tool or the theory behind it. The paper gives an overview of possible pitfalls and ways to circumvent them and discusses the opportunities offered by using annotations in corpus-based and corpus-driven grammatical research against the background of a scientifically sound methodology.
The present article describes the first stage of the KorAP project, launched recently at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The aim of this project is to develop an innovative corpus analysis platform to tackle the increasing demands of modern linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse primary data and annotations in the petabyte range, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary linguistic data, and thus fully satisfying the demands of a scientific tool. An additional important aim of the project is to make corpus data as openly accessible as possible in light of unavoidable legal restrictions, for instance through support for distributed virtual corpora, user-defined annotations and adaptable user interfaces, as well as interfaces and sandboxes for user-supplied analysis applications. We discuss our motivation for undertaking this endeavour and the challenges that face it. Next, we outline our software implementation plan and describe development to-date.
Valenz und Kookkurrenz
(2015)
Die Programmbereiche „Korpuslinguistik“ und „Mündliche Korpora“ haben am IDS die Aufgabe, Grundlagen für die empirische Erforschung der deutschen Sprache zu legen. Unter anderem sammeln und erstellen sie schriftliche und mündliche Korpora, bereiten sie für eine wissenschaftliche Nutzung auf und stellen sie über Web-Oberflächen (COSMAS, DGD2 demnächst KorAP) zur Verfügung. Unser Beitrag gibt zunächst einen Überblick über Entstehungsgeschichte und aktuellen Stand dieser Arbeiten. Mit einem Blick in die Zukunft widmen wir uns auch der Frage, ob und in welcher Weise das Schlagwort ,Big Data‘ für diese Arten linguistischer Ressourcen relevant ist. In Bezug auf die schriftlichen Korpora wird dabei insbesondere über die diesjährige DEREKo-Erweiterung um über 17 Milliarden Wörter und die damit verbundenen Arbeiten berichtet. In diesem Zusammenhang werden u.a. DeReKos Design, die zugrundeliegende Akquisitionsstrategie und Überlegungen zu Dispersion und Stratifizierbarkeit diskutiert. Die spezifischen Herausforderungen, die sich beim Aufbau eines großen Gesprächskorpus stellen, werden am Beispiel des Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) diskutiert. Dabei steht außer Frage, dass angesichts des Aufwandes, den Feldzugang sowie Erschließung der im Feld gewonnenen Audio- und Videodaten bedeuten, vergleichbare Datenmengen und Wachstumsraten wie bei Textkorpora nicht zu erreichen sind. Für den Aufbau umfangreicher mündlicher Korpora ist daher die Entwicklung eines eigenen Methodeninstrumentariums notwendig.
The KorAP project (“Korpusanalyseplattform der nächste Generation”, “Corpus-analysis platform of the next generation”), carried out at the Institut fUr Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, has as its goal the development of a modem, state-of-the-art corpus-analysis platform, capable of handling very large corpora and opening the perspectives for innovative linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse extremely large amounts of primary data and annotations, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary un-annotated text, and thus fully satisfying expectations associated with a scientific tool. The project started in July 2011 and is funded till June 2014. The demo presentation in December will be the first version following a preliminary feature freeze, and will open the alpha testing phase of the project.
Maximizing the potential of very large corpora: 50 years of big language data at IDS Mannheim
(2014)
Very large corpora have been built and used at the IDS since its foundation in 1964. They have been made available on the Internet since the beginning of the 90’s to currently over 30,000 researchers worldwide. The Institute provides the largest archive of written German (Deutsches Referenzkorpus, DeReKe) which has recently been extended to 24 billion words. DeReKe has been managed and analysed by engines known as COSMAS and afterwards COSMAS II, which is currently being replaced by a new, scalable analysis platform called KorAP. KorAP makes it possible to manage and analyse texts that are accompanied by multiple, potentially conflicting, grammatical and structural annotation layers, and is able to handle resources that are distributed across different, and possibly geographically distant, storage systems. The majority of texts in DeReKe are not licensed for free redistribution, hence, the COSMAS and KorAP systems offer technical solutions to facilitate research on very large corpora that are not available (and not suitable) for download. For the new KorAP system, it is also planned to provide sandboxed environments to support non-remote-API access “near the data” through which users can run their own analysis programs.
We present an approach to an aspect of managing complex access scenarios to large and heterogeneous corpora that involves handling user queries that, intentionally or due to the complexity of the queried resource, target texts or annotations outside of the given user’s permissions. We first outline the overall architecture of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, devoting some attention to the way in which it handles multiple query languages, by implementing ISO CQLF (Corpus Query Lingua Franca), which in turn constitutes a component crucial for the functionality discussed here. Next, we look at query rewriting as it is used by KorAP and zoom in on one kind of this procedure, namely the rewriting of queries that is forced by data access restrictions.
This paper gives an overview of recent developments in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo in terms of growth, maximising relevant corpus strata, metadata, legal issues, and its current and future research interface. Due to the recent acquisition of new licenses, DeReKo has grown by a factor of four in the first half of 2014, mostly in the area of newspaper text, and presently contains over 24 billion word tokens. Other strata, like fictional texts, web corpora, in particular CMC texts, and spoken but conceptually written texts have also increased significantly. We report on the newly acquired corpora that led to the major increase, on the principles and strategies behind our corpus acquisition activities, and on our solutions for the emerging legal, organisational, and technical challenges.
Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie und inwieweit korpusbasierte Ansätze zur Untersuchung und Bewertung von Sprachwandel beitragen können. Die Bewertung von Sprachwandel erscheint in dieser Hinsicht interessant, da sie erstens von größerem öffentlichen Interesse ist, zweitens nicht zu den Kernthemen der Sprachwissenschaft zählt und drittens sowohl die geisteswissenschaftlichen Aspekte der Sprachwissenschaft berührt als auch die empirischen, die eher für die so genannten harten Wissenschaften typisch sind. Letzteres trifft bei der Frage nach Sprachverfall (gutem vs. schlechtem Deutsch diachron) vermutlich unbestrittener zu als bei der Frage nach richtigem vs. falschem Deutsch, da zu ihrer Beantwortung offensichtlich einerseits empirische, messbare Kriterien herangezogen werden müssen, andererseits aber auch weitere Kriterien notwendig sind und es außerdem einer Entscheidung zur Einordnung und Gewichtung der verschiedenartigen Kriterien sowie einer Begründung dieser Entscheidung bedarf. Zur Annäherung an die Fragestellung werden zunächst gängige, leicht operationalisierbare Hypothesen zu Symptomen eines potenziellen Verfalls des Deutschen auf verschiedenen DeReKo-basierten Korpora überprüft und im Hinblick auf ihre Verallgemeinerbarkeit und Tragweite diskutiert. Im zweiten Teil werden weitere empirische Ansätze zur Untersuchung von Wandel, Variation und Dynamik skizziert, die zur Diskussion spezieller Aspekte von Sprachverfall beitragen könnten. Im Schlussteil werden die vorgestellten Ansätze in den Gesamtkontext einer sprachwissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Sprachverfall gestellt und vor dem Hintergrund seines gesellschaftlichen Diskurses reflektiert.
^This paper describes DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, and the rationale behind its development. We discuss its design, its legal background, how to access it, available metadata, linguistic annotation layers, underlying standards, ongoing developments, and aspects of using the archive for empirical linguistic research. The focus of the paper is on the advantages of DEREKO’s design as a primordial sample from which virtual corpora can be drawn for the specific purposes of individual studies. Both concepts, primordial sample and virtual corpus are explained and illustrated in detail. Furthermore, we describe in more detail how DEREKO deals with the fact that all its texts are subject to third parties’ intellectual property rights, and how it deals with the issue of replicability, which is particularly challenging given DEREKO’s dynamic growth and the possibility to construct from it an open number of virtual corpora.