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The paper reports the results of the curation project ChatCorpus2CLARIN. The goal of the project was to develop a workflow and resources for the integration of an existing chat corpus into the CLARIN-D research infrastructure for language resources and tools in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (http://clarin-d.de). The paper presents an overview of the resources and practices developed in the project, describes the added value of the resource after its integration and discusses, as an outlook, to what extent these practices can be considered best practices which may be useful for the annotation and representation of other CMC and social media corpora.
In recent years, formal semantic research on the meaning of tense and aspect has benefited from a number of studies investigating languages with graded tense systems. This paper contributes a first sketch of the temporal marking system of Awing (Grassfields Bantu), focusing on two varieties of remote past and remote future. We argue that the data support a "symmetric" analysis of past and future tense in Awing. In our specific proposal, Awing temporal remoteness markers are uniformly analyzed as quantificational tense operators, and both the past and the future paradigm include a form that prevents contextual restriction of this temporal quantifier.
This paper presents the application of the <tiger2/> format to various linguistic scenarios with the aim of making it the standard serialisation for the ISO 24615 [1] (SynAF) standard. After outlining the main characteristics of both the SynAF metamodel and the <tiger2/> format, as extended from the initial Tiger XML format [2], we show through a range of different language families how <tiger2/> covers a variety of constituency and dependency based analyses.
Sogenannte „Pragmatikalisierte Mehrworteinheiten“ sind im Deutschen hochfrequent und unterliegen bisweilen tiefgreifenden phonetischen Reduktionsprozessen. Diese können Realisierungsvarianten hervorbringen, die in der Rückschau auf mehr als eine lexematische Ursprungsform zurückführbar sind. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht mit [ˈzɐmɐ] einen besonders prägnanten Fall dieser Art anhand eines Perzeptionsexperimentes.
Song lyrics can be considered as a text genre that has features of both written and spoken discourse, and potentially provides extensive linguistic and cultural information to scientists from various disciplines. However, pop songs play a rather subordinate role in empirical language research so far - most likely due to the absence of scientifically valid and sustainable resources. The present paper introduces a multiply annotated corpus of German lyrics as a publicly available basis for multidisciplinary research. The resource contains three types of data for the investigation and evaluation of quite distinct phenomena: TEI-compliant song lyrics as primary data, linguistically and literary motivated annotations, and extralinguistic metadata. It promotes empirically/statistically grounded analyses of genre-specific features, systemic-structural correlations and tendencies in the texts of contemporary pop music. The corpus has been stratified into thematic and author-specific archives; the paper presents some basic descriptive statistics, as well as the public online frontend with its built-in evaluation forms and live visualisations.
In this paper, we will present a first attempt to classify commonly confused words in German by consulting their communicative functions in corpora. Although the use of so-called paronyms causes frequent uncertainties due to similarities in spelling, sound and semantics, up until now the phenomenon has attracted little attention either from the perspective of corpus linguistics or from cognitive linguistics. Existing investigations rely on structuralist models, which do not account for empirical evidence. Still, they have developed an elaborate model based on formal criteria, primarily on word formation (cf. Lăzărescu 1999). Looking from a corpus perspective, such classifications are incompatible with language in use and cognitive elements of misuse.
This article sketches first lexicological insights into a classification model as derived from semantic analyses of written communication. Firstly, a brief description of the project will be provided. Secondly, corpus-assisted paronym detection will be focused. Thirdly, in the main section the paper concerns the description of the datasets for paronym classification and the classification procedures. As a work in progress, new insights will continually be extended once spoken and CMC data are added to the investigations.
This paper presents a short insight into a new project at the "Institute for the German Language” (IDS) (Mannheim). It gives an insight into some basic ideas for a corpus-based dictionary of spoken German, which will be developed and compiled by the new project "The Lexicon of spoken German” (Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe). The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German” (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK), which is implemented in the "Database for Spoken German” (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD). Both resources, the database and the corpus, have been developed at the IDS.
This paper presents the prototype of a lexicographic resource for spoken German in interaction, which was conceived within the framework of the LeGeDe-project (LeGeDe=Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch). First of all, it summarizes the theoretical and methodological approaches that were used for the initial planning of the resource. The headword candidates were selected by analyzing corpus-based data. Therefore, the data of two corpora (written and spoken German) were compared with quantitative methods. The information that was gathered on the selected headword candidates can be assigned to two different sections: meanings and functions in interaction.
Additionally, two studies on the expectations of future users towards the resource were carried out. The results of these two studies were also taken into account in the development of the prototype. Focusing on the presentation of the resource’s content, the paper shows both the different lexicographical information in selected dictionary entries, and the information offered by the provided hyperlinks and external texts. As a conclusion, it summarizes the most important innovative aspects that were specifically developed for the implementation of such a resource.
Ph@ttSessionz and Deutsch heute are two large German speech databases. They were created for different purposes: Ph@ttSessionz to test Internet-based recordings and to adapt speech recognizers to the voices of adolescent speakers, Deutsch heute to document regional variation of German. The databases differ in their recording technique, the selection of recording locations and speakers, elicitation mode, and data processing.
In this paper, we outline how the recordings were performed, how the data was processed and annotated, and how the two databases were imported into a single relational database system. We present acoustical measurements on the digit items of both databases. Our results confirm that the elicitation technique affects the speech produced, that f0 is quite comparable despite different recording procedures, and that large speech technology databases with suitable metadata may well be used for the analysis of regional variation of speech.
There have been several attempts to annotate communicative functions to utterances of verbal feedback in English previously. Here, we suggest an annotation scheme for verbal and non-verbal feedback utterances in French including the categories base, attitude, previous and visual. The data comprises conversations, maptasks and negotiations from which we extracted ca. 13,000 candidate feedback utterances and gestures. 12 students were recruited for the annotation campaign of ca. 9,500 instances. Each instance was annotated by between 2 and 7 raters. The evaluation of the annotation agreement resulted in an average best-pair kappa of 0.6. While the base category with the values acknowledgement, evaluation, answer, elicit and other achieves good agreement, this is not the case for the other main categories. The data sets, which also include automatic extractions of lexical, positional and acoustic features, are freely available and will further be used for machine learning classification experiments to analyse the form-function relationship of feedback.
We present a descriptive analysis on the two datasets from the shared task on Source, Subjective Expression and Target Extraction from Political Speeches (STEPS), the only existing German dataset for opinion role extraction of its size. Our analysis discusses the individual properties of the three components, subjective expressions, sources and targets and their relations towards each other. Our observations should help practitioners and researchers when building a system to extract opinion roles from German data.
The present paper reports the first results of the compilation and annotation of a blog corpus for German. The main aim of the project is the representation of the blog discourse structure and relations between its elements (blog posts, comments) and participants (bloggers, commentators). The data included in the corpus were manually collected from the scientific blog portal SciLogs. The feature catalogue for the corpus annotation includes three types of information which is directly or indirectly provided in the blog or can be construed by means of statistical analysis or computational tools. At this point, only directly available information (e.g. title of the blog post, name of the blogger etc.) has been annotated. We believe, our blog corpus can be of interest for the general study of blog structure or related research questions as well as for the development of NLP methods and techniques (e.g. for authorship detection).
We present an implemented XML data model and a new, simplified query language for multi-level annotated corpora. The new query language involves automatic conversion of queries into the underlying, more complicated MMAXQL query language. It supports queries for sequential and hierarchical, but also associative (e.g. coreferential) relations. The simplified query language has been designed with non-expert users in mind.
Linguistic query systems are special purpose IR applications. We present a novel state-of-the-art approach for the efficient exploitation of very large linguistic corpora, combining the advantages of relational database management systems (RDBMS) with the functional MapReduce programming model. Our implementation uses the German DEREKO reference corpus with multi-layer linguistic annotations and several types of text-specific metadata, but the proposed strategy is language-independent and adaptable to large-scale multilingual corpora.
We present a gold standard for semantic relation extraction in the food domain for German. The relation types that we address are motivated by scenarios for which IT applications present a commercial potential, such as virtual customer advice in which a virtual agent assists a customer in a supermarket in finding those products that satisfy their needs best. Moreover, we focus on those relation types that can be extracted from natural language text corpora, ideally content from the internet, such as web forums, that are easy to retrieve. A typical relation type that meets these requirements are pairs of food items that are usually consumed together. Such a relation type could be used by a virtual agent to suggest additional products available in a shop that would potentially complement the items a customer has already in their shopping cart. Our gold standard comprises structural data, i.e. relation tables, which encode relation instances. These tables are vital in order to evaluate natural language processing systems that extract those relations.
We present a testsuite for POS tagging German web data. Our testsuite provides the original raw text as well as the gold tokenisations and is annotated for parts-of-speech. The testsuite includes a new dataset for German tweets, with a current size of 3,940 tokens. To increase the size of the data, we harmonised the annotations in already existing web corpora, based on the Stuttgart-Tübingen Tag Set. The current version of the corpus has an overall size of 48,344 tokens of web data, around half of it from Twitter. We also present experiments, showing how different experimental setups (training set size, additional out-of-domain training data, self-training) influence the accuracy of the taggers. All resources and models will be made publicly available to the research community.
We apply a decision tree based approach to pronoun resolution in spoken dialogue. Our system deals with pronouns with NP- and non-NP-antecedents. We present a set of features designed for pronoun resolution in spoken dialogue and determine the most promising features. We evaluate the system on twenty Switchboard dialogues and show that it compares well to Byron’s (2002) manually tuned system.
Creating and maintaining metadata for various kinds of resources requires appropriate tools to assist the user. The paper presents the metadata editor ProFormA for the creation and editing of CMDI (Component Metadata Infrastructure) metadata in web forms. This editor supports a number of CMDI profiles currently being provided for different types of resources. Since the editor is based on XForms and server-side processing, users can create and modify CMDI files in their standard browser without the need for further processing. Large parts of ProFormA are implemented as web services in order to reuse them in other contexts and programs.
In this paper we present a new approach to lexicographical design for the description of German speech act verbs. This approach is based on an action-theoretical semantic conception. The several conditions for linguistic action provide the basis for the elaboration of the central semantic features. The systematic relationship of these features is reflected in the organization of a lexical database which allows various possibilities of access to different types of lexical information.
In the following paper we shall give an outline of the semantic framework for describing speech act verbs, i. e. verbs of communication, with the practical goal of a semantical database for a (dictionary of) synonymy of German speech act verbs which enables the user not only to find a list of synonymous verbs but also enables him to gain an insight into the semantic relations between the words.
The semantic framework is based on
(i) a set of conditions for performing speech acts as the relevant domain of reference
(ii) the introduction of a notion of situation, or better type of situation
The performative as well as the descriptive use of the verbs can be reduced to their fundamental dependency on the situations in which they are used: on the one hand with regard to the possibility of the action itself, and on the other hand with regard to the possibility of their designation. For both ways of use the relevant aspects of the situation constitute the necessary conditions.
One of the most popular techniques used in HPSG-based studies to describe linguistic phenomena is the raising mechanism. Besides ordinary raising verbs or adjectives, this tool has been applied for handling verbal complexes and discontinuous constituents, among other phenomena. In this paper, a new application for raising within the HPSG paradigm will be discussed, thereby investigating data from the prepositional domain. We will analyze linguistic properties of word combinations in German consisting of a preposition, a noun, and another preposition (such as auf Grund von (‘by virtue of’)), thus arguing that raising is the most appropriate method for satisfactorily describing the crucial syntactic features which are typical for those expressions. The objective of this paper is thus to demonstrate the efficiency of the raising mechanism as used in HPSG, and therefore, to emphasize the importance of designing a satisfactory uniform theory of raising within this grammar framework.
One of the most popular techniques used in HPSG-based studies to describe linguistic phenomena is the raising mechanism. Besides ordinary raising verbs or adjectives, this tool has been applied for handling verbal complexes and discontinuous constituents, among other phenomena. In this paper, a new application for raising within the HPSG paradigm will be discussed, thereby investigating data from the prepositional domain. We will analyze linguistic properties of word combinations in German consisting of a preposition, a noun, and another preposition (such as auf Grund von (‘by virtue of’)), thus arguing that raising is the most appropriate method for satisfactorily describing the crucial syntactic features which are typical for those expressions. The objective of this paper is thus to demonstrate the efficiency of the raising mechanism as used in HPSG, and therefore, to emphasize the importance of designing a satisfactory uniform theory of raising within this grammar framework.
The understanding of story variation, whether motivated by cultural currents or other factors, is important for applications of formal models of narrative such as story generation or story retrieval. We present the first stage of an experiment to elicit natural narrative variation data suitable for evaluation with respect to story similarity, to qualitative and quantitative analysis of story variation, and also for data processing. We also present few preliminary results from the first stage of the experiment, using Red Riding Hood and Romeo and Juliet as base texts.
XML has been designed for creating structured documents, but the information that is encoded in these structures are, by definition, out of scope for XML. Additional sources, normally not easily interpretable by computers, such as documentation are needed to determine the intention of specific tags in a tag-set. The Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) takes a rather pragmatic approach to foster interoperability between XML instances in the domain of metadata descriptions for language resources. This paper gives an overview of this approach.
This paper presents the current results of an ongoing research project on corpus distribution of prepositions and pronouns within Polish preposition-pronoun contractions. The goal of the project is to provide a quantitative description of Polish preposition-pronoun contractions taking into consideration morphosyntactic properties of their components. It is expected that the results will provide a basis for a revision of the traditionally assumed inflectional paradigms of Polish pronouns and, thus, for a possible remodeling of these paradigms. The results of corpus-based investigations of the distribution of prepositions within preposition-pronoun contractions can be used for grammar-theoretical and lexicographic purposes.
This paper presents the system architecture as well as the underlying workflow of the Extensible Repository System of Digital Objects (ERDO) which has been developed for the sustainable archiving of language resources within the Tübingen CLARIN-D project. In contrast to other approaches focusing on archiving experts, the described workflow can be used by researchers without required knowledge in the field of long-term storage for transferring data from their local file systems into a persistent repository.
This paper describes the lexical database tool LOLA (Linguistic-Oriented Lexical database Approach) which has been developed for the construction and maintenance of lexicons for the machine translation system LMT. First, the requirements such a tool should meet are discussed, then LMT and the lexical information it requires, and some issues concerning vocabulary acquisition are presented. Afterwards the architecture and the components of the LOLA system are described and it is shown how we tried to meet the requirements worked out earlier. Although LOLA originally has been designed and implemented for the German-English LMT prototype, it aimed from the beginning at a representation of lexical data that can be reused for other LMT or MT prototypes or even other NLP applications. A special point of discussion will therefore be the adaptability of the tool and its components as well as the reusability of the lexical data stored in the database for the lexicon development for LMT or for other applications.
Feedback utterances are among the most frequent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of linguistic theories that take social interaction, involving language, into account. This paper introduces the corpora and datasets of a project scrutinizing this kind of feedback utterances in French. We present the genesis of the corpora (for a total of about 16 hours of transcribed and phone force-aligned speech) involved in the project. We introduce the resulting datasets and discuss how they are being used in on-going work with focus on the form-function relationship of conversational feedback. All the corpora created and the datasets produced in the framework of this project will be made available for research purposes.
A Supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets from German text
(2019)
We present the first systematic supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets on German language data. A wide choice of different features is presented, particularly syntactic features and generalization features. We point out specific differences between opinion sources and targets. Moreover, we explain why implicit sources can be extracted even with fairly generic features. In order to ensure comparability our classifier is trained and tested on the dataset of the STEPS shared task.
This paper presents a survey on hate speech detection. Given the steadily growing body of social media content, the amount of online hate speech is also increasing. Due to the massive scale of the web, methods that automatically detect hate speech are required. Our survey describes key areas that have been explored to automatically recognize these types of utterances using natural language processing. We also discuss limits of those approaches.
This paper presents a survey on the role of negation in sentiment analysis. Negation is a very common linguistic construction that affects polarity and, therefore, needs to be taken into consideration in sentiment analysis.
We will present various computational approaches modeling negation in sentiment analysis. We will, in particular, focus on aspects such as level of representation used for sentiment analysis, negation word detection and scope of negation. We will also discuss limits and challenges of negation modeling on that task.
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 Manatee corpus management system on which the Sketch Engine is built is efficient, but unable to harness the power of today’s multiprocessor machines. We describe a new, compatible implementation of Manatee which we develop in the Go language and report on the performance gains that we obtained.
This paper presents Release 2.0 of the SALSA corpus, a German resource for lexical semantics. The new corpus release provides new annotations for German nouns, complementing the existing annotations of German verbs in Release 1.0. The corpus now includes around 24,000 sentences with more than 36,000 annotated instances. It was designed with an eye towards NLP applications such as semantic role labeling but will also be a useful resource for linguistic studies in lexical semantics.
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).
Besides English, Afrikaans is considered “the [Germanic] language which deviates grammatically the farthest from the others” (Harbert 2007: 17). But how exactly do we measure “grammatical deviation”, and how deviant is Afrikaans really if we compare it not just to other standard languages but also to non-standard varieties? The present contribution aims to address those questions combining functional-typological and dialectometric perspectives. We first select data for 28 Germanic varieties showing vastly different speaker numbers, grades of standardisation and amounts of language contact. Based on 48 (micro)typological variables from syntax, morphology and phonology, we perform cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling and present ways of visualizing and interpreting the results. Inter alia, the analyses show a major divide between Continental West Germanic and North Germanic (as might be expected) and they also identify a number of outliers, including English and pidgin and creole languages such as Russenorsk or Rabaul Creole German. Afrikaans appears to cluster with the other West Germanic languages rather than the outliers. Within West Germanic, however, it does indeed emerge as rather deviant and, according to our metric, it is, for example, typologically closer to other high-contact varieties such as Yiddish than it is to Dutch.
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.
We describe a simple and efficient Java object model and application programming interface (API) for (possibly multi-modal) annotated natural language corpora. Corpora are represented as elements like Sentences, Turns, Utterances, Words, Gestures and Markables. The API allows linguists to access corpora in terms of these discourse-level elements, i.e. at a conceptual level they are familiar with, with the flexibility offered by a general purpose programming language. It is also a contribution to corpus standardization efforts because it is based on a straightforward and easily extensible data model which can serve as a target for conversion of different corpus formats.
We investigate whether prototypicality or prominence of semantic roles can account for role-related effects in sentence interpretation. We present two acceptability-rating experiments testing three different constructions: active, personal passive and DO-clefts involving the same type of transitive verbs that differ with respect to the agentive role features they select. Our results reveal that there is no cross-constructional advantage for prototypical roles (e.g., agents), hence disconfirming a central tenet of role prototypicality. Rather, acceptability clines depend on the construction under investigation, thereby highlighting different role features. This finding is in line with one core assumption of the prominence account stating that role features are flexibly highlighted depending on the discourse function of the respective construction.
This paper aims to address these problems by dealing with theoretical and methodological questions concerning the national effects of the Bologna Process and the role national factors play in determining the impact of these effects. Altogether the purpose of the paper is to serve as a starting point for future research – both as a guide for systematic and comparative empirical work on higher education, but also for further theoretical and methodological reasoning concerning research on (higher) education policy. As higher education research so far particularly lacks an approach allowing for a competitive and systematic falsification of theoretical arguments by clearly indicating testable and specific hypothesis as well as variables behind the research design (Goedegebuure/Vught 1996) we propose to fall back on neighbouring disciplines, namely social science to improve and enhance the analysis (Slaughter 2001: 398; Altbach 2002: 154; Teichler 1996a: 433, 2005: 448). Several strands of research have to be considered – namely literature on Europeanization as well as insights and approaches of studies dealing with cross-national policy convergence. Taking into account the non-obligatory and mainly intergovernmental character of the Bologna Process the main focus of the paper is on factors related to the effects of transnational communication. The inherent goal is to extend the research agenda on higher education (McLendon 2003: 184ff) and to leave behind the restriction of to analyse only a few cases by striving for a research design that allows for systematic testing and sufficient explanations of cross-national policy convergence at the interface between the Bologna Process and domestic factors.
Annotating Discourse Relations in Spoken Language: A Comparison of the PDTB and CCR Frameworks
(2016)
In discourse relation annotation, there is currently a variety of different frameworks being used, and most of them have been developed and employed mostly on written data. This raises a number of questions regarding interoperability of discourse relation annotation schemes, as well as regarding differences in discourse annotation for written vs. spoken domains. In this paper, we describe ouron annotating two spoken domains from the SPICE Ireland corpus (telephone conversations and broadcast interviews) according todifferent discourse annotation schemes, PDTB 3.0 and CCR. We show that annotations in the two schemes can largely be mappedone another, and discuss differences in operationalisations of discourse relation schemes which present a challenge to automatic mapping. We also observe systematic differences in the prevalence of implicit discourse relations in spoken data compared to written texts,find that there are also differences in the types of causal relations between the domains. Finally, we find that PDTB 3.0 addresses many shortcomings of PDTB 2.0 wrt. the annotation of spoken discourse, and suggest further extensions. The new corpus has roughly theof the CoNLL 2015 Shared Task test set, and we hence hope that it will be a valuable resource for the evaluation of automatic discourse relation labellers.
The workshop presents ATHEN 1 (Annotation and Text Highlighting Environment), an extensible desktop-based annotation environment which supports more than just regular annotation. Besides being a general purpose annotation environment, ATHEN supports indexing and querying support of your data as well as the ability to automatically preprocess your data with Meta information. It is especially suited for those who want to extend existing general purpose annotation tools by implementing their own custom features, which cannot be fulfilled by other available annotation environments. On the according gitlab, we provide online tutorials, which demonstrate the use of specific features of ATHEN
Feedback utterances are among the most frequent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of all linguistic theories that take social interaction involving language into account. However, determining communicative functions is a notoriously difficult task both for human interpreters and systems. It involves an interpretative process that integrates various sources of information. Existing work on communicative function classification comes from either dialogue act tagging where it is generally coarse grained concerning the feed- back phenomena or it is token-based and does not address the variety of forms that feed- back utterances can take. This paper introduces an annotation framework, the dataset and the related annotation campaign (involving 7 raters to annotate nearly 6000 utterances). We present its evaluation not merely in terms of inter-rater agreement but also in terms of usability of the resulting reference dataset both from a linguistic research perspective and from a more applicative viewpoint.
In this paper, we investigate the practical applicability of Co-Training for the task of building a classifier for reference resolution. We are concerned with the question if Co-Training can significantly reduce the amount of manual labeling work and still produce a classifier with an acceptable performance.
This work exploited coarticulation and loud speech as natural sources of perturbation in order to determine whether articulatory covariation (motor equivalent behavior) can be observed inspeech that is not artificially perturbed. Articulatory analyses of jaw and tongue movement in the production of alveolar consonants by German speakers were performed. The sibilant /s/ shows virtually no articulatory covariation under the influence of natural perturbations, whereas other alveolar consonants show more obvious compensatory behavior. Our conclusion is that an effect of natural sources of perturbation is noticable, but sounds are affected to different degrees.
Our paper describes an experiment aimed to assessment of lexical coverage in web corpora in comparison with the traditional ones for two closely related Slavic languages from the lexicographers’ perspective. The preliminary results show that web corpora should not be considered ― inferior, but rather ― different.
Common Crawl is a considerably large, heterogeneous multilingual corpus comprised of crawled documents from the internet, surpassing 20TB of data and distributed as a set of more than 50 thousand plain text files where each contains many documents written in a wide variety of languages. Even though each document has a metadata block associated to it, this data lacks any information about the language in which each document is written, making it extremely difficult to use Common Crawl for monolingual applications. We propose a general, highly parallel, multithreaded pipeline to clean and classify Common Crawl by language; we specifically design it so that it runs efficiently on medium to low resource infrastructures where I/O speeds are the main constraint. We develop the pipeline so that it can be easily reapplied to any kind of heterogeneous corpus and so that it can be parameterised to a wide range of infrastructures. We also distribute a 6.3TB version of Common Crawl, filtered, classified by language, shuffled at line level in order to avoid copyright issues, and ready to be used for NLP applications.
The effect of manipulation of a speaker’s voice as well as exposure to a native speaker’s utterance was investigated regarding the pronunciation of stops by German learners of French. Three subject groups, a Control (CG), a Manipulation (MG), and a Native Speaker (NG) Group, were recorded on two subsequent days. The MG was presented with a manipulation of their voice on the second day and the NG listened to a native French speaker, while the CG did not receive any feedback. Results show that speakers of the MG and NG were able to extract useful information from the respective feedback and successfully adapted to it. Participants were able to reduce their voice onset time values, although speakers of the NG reduced it to a greater extent.
We present data-driven methods for the acquisition of LFG resources from two German treebanks. We discuss problems specific to semi-free word order languages as well as problems arising from the data structures determined by the design of the different treebanks. We compare two ways of encoding semi-free word order, as done in the two German treebanks, and argue that the design of the TiGer treebank is more adequate for the acquisition of LFG resources. Furthermore, we describe an architecture for LFG grammar acquisition for German, based on the two German treebanks, and compare our results with a hand-crafted German LFG grammar.
In this paper, we describe preliminary results from an ongoing experiment wherein we classify two large unstructured text corpora—a web corpus and a newspaper corpus—by topic domain (or subject area). Our primary goal is to develop a method that allows for the reliable annotation of large crawled web corpora with meta data required by many corpus linguists. We are especially interested in designing an annotation scheme whose categories are both intuitively interpretable by linguists and firmly rooted in the distribution of lexical material in the documents. Since we use data from a web corpus and a more traditional corpus, we also contribute to the important field of corpus comparison and corpus evaluation. Technically, we use (unsupervised) topic modeling to automatically induce topic distributions over gold standard corpora that were manually annotated for 13 coarse-grained topic domains. In a second step, we apply supervised machine learning to learn the manually annotated topic domains using the previously induced topics as features. We achieve around 70% accuracy in 10-fold cross validations. An analysis of the errors clearly indicates, however, that a revised classification scheme and larger gold standard corpora will likely lead to a substantial increase in accuracy.
We present an implemented machine learning system for the automatic detection of nonreferential it in spoken dialog. The system builds on shallow features extracted from dialog transcripts. Our experiments indicate a level of performance that makes the system usable as a preprocessing filter for a coreference resolution system. We also report results of an annotation study dealing with the classification of it by naive subjects.
Automatic Food Categorization from Large Unlabeled Corpora and Its Impact on Relation Extraction
(2014)
We present a weakly-supervised induction method to assign semantic information to food items. We consider two tasks of categorizations being food-type classification and the distinction of whether a food item is composite or not. The categorizations are induced by a graph-based algorithm applied on a large unlabeled domain-specific corpus. We show that the usage of a domain-specific corpus is vital. We do not only outperform a manually designed open-domain ontology but also prove the usefulness of these categorizations in relation extraction, outperforming state-of-the-art features that include syntactic information and Brown clustering.
This paper describes work directed towards the development of a syllable prominence-based prosody generation functionality for a German unit selection speech synthesis system. A general concept for syllable prominence-based prosody generation in unit selection synthesis is proposed. As a first step towards its implementation, an automated syllable prominence annotation procedure based on acoustic analyses has been performed on the BOSS speech corpus. The prominence labeling has been evaluated against an existing annotation of lexical stress levels and manual prominence labeling on a subset of the corpus. We discuss methods and results and give an outlook on further implementation steps.
Germany’s diverse history in the 20th century raises the question of how social upheavals were constituted in and through political discourse. By analysing basic concepts, the research network “The 20th century in basic concepts” (based at the Leibniz institutes IDS, ZfL, ZZF) aims to identify continuities and discontinuities in political and social discourse. In this way, historical sediments of the present are to be uncovered and those challenges identified that emerged in the course of the 20th century and continue to shape political discourse until the present.
Bootstrapping Supervised Machine-learning Polarity Classifiers with Rule-based Classification
(2010)
In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of bootstrapping supervised machine-learning polarity classifiers using the output of domain-independent rule-based classifiers. The benefit of this method is that no labeled training data are required. Still, this method allows to capture in-domain knowledge by training the supervised classifier on in-domain features, such as bag of words.
We investigate how important the quality of the rule-based classifier is and what features are useful for the supervised classifier. The former addresses the issue in how far relevant constructions for polarity classification, such as word sense disambiguation, negation modeling, or intensification, are important for this self-training approach. We not only compare how this method relates to conventional semi-supervised learning but also examine how it performs under more difficult settings in which classes are not balanced and mixed reviews are included in the dataset.
Active learning has been applied to different NLP tasks, with the aim of limiting the amount of time and cost for human annotation. Most studies on active learning have only simulated the annotation scenario, using prelabelled gold standard data. We present the first active learning experiment for Word Sense Disambiguation with human annotators in a realistic environment, using fine-grained sense distinctions, and investigate whether AL can reduce annotation cost and boost classifier performance when applied to a real-world task.
Usenet is a large online resource containing user-generated messages (news articles) organised in discussion groups (newsgroups) which deal with a wide variety of different topics. We describe the download, conversion, and annotation of a comprehensive German news corpus for integration in DeReKo, the German Reference Corpus hosted at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim.
This paper describes the application of probabilistic part of speech taggers to the Dzongkha language. A tag set containing 66 tags is designed, which is based on the Penn Treebank. A training corpus of 40,247 tokens is utilized to train the model. Using the lexicon extracted from the training corpus and lexicon from the available word list, we used two statistical taggers for comparison reasons. The best result achieved was 93.1% accuracy in a 10-fold cross validation on the training set. The winning tagger was thereafter applied to annotate a 570,247 token corpus.
This paper presents C-WEP, the Collection of Writing Errors by Professionals Writers of German. It currently consists of 245 sentences with grammatical errors. All sentences are taken from published texts. All authors are professional writers with high skill levels with respect to German, the genres, and the topics. The purpose of this collection is to provide seeds for more sophisticated writing support tools as only a very small proportion of those errors can be detected by state-of-the-art checkers. C-WEP is annotated on various levels and freely available.
Catching the common cause: extraction and annotation of causal relations and their participants
(2017)
In this paper, we present a simple, yet effective method for the automatic identification and extraction of causal relations from text, based on a large English-German parallel corpus. The goal of this effort is to create a lexical resource for German causal relations. The resource will consist of a lexicon that describes constructions that trigger causality as well as the participants of the causal event, and will be augmented by a corpus with annotated instances for each entry, that can be used as training data to develop a system for automatic classification of causal relations. Focusing on verbs, our method harvested a set of 100 different lexical triggers of causality, including support verb constructions. At the moment, our corpus includes over 1,000 annotated instances. The lexicon and the annotated data will be made available to the research community.
The availability of large multi-parallel corpora offers an enormous wealth of material to contrastive corpus linguists, translators and language learners, if we can exploit the data properly. Necessary preparation steps include sentence and word alignment across multiple languages. Additionally, linguistic annotation such as partof- speech tagging, lemmatisation, chunking, and dependency parsing facilitate precise querying of linguistic properties and can be used to extend word alignment to sub-sentential groups. Such highly interconnected data is stored in a relational database to allow for efficient retrieval and linguistic data mining, which may include the statistics-based selection of good example sentences. The varying information needs of contrastive linguists require a flexible linguistic query language for ad hoc searches. Such queries in the format of generalised treebank query languages will be automatically translated into SQL queries.
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.
Die durch die Covid-19-Pandemie bedingte Umstellung der Präsenzlehre auf digitale Lehr- und Lernformate stellte Lehrende und Studierende gleichermaßen vor eine Herausforderung. Innerhalb kürzester Zeit musste die Nutzung von Plattformen und digitalen Tools erlernt und getestet werden. Der Beitrag stellt exemplarisch Dienste und Werkzeuge von CLARIAH-DE vor und erläutert, wie die digitale Forschungsinfrastruktur Lehrende und Studierende auch im Rahmen der digitalen Lehre unterstützen kann.
CLARIN contractual framework for sharing language data: the perspective of personal data protection
(2020)
The article analyses the responsibility for ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in research settings. As a general rule, organisations are considered the data controller (responsible party for the GDPR compliance). Research constitutes a unique setting influenced by academic freedom. This raises the question of whether academics could be considered the controller as well. However, there are some court cases and policy documents on this issue. It is not settled yet. The analysis serves a preliminary analytical background for redesigning CLARIN contractual framework for sharing data.
Data Management is one of the core activities of all CLARIN centres providing data and services for the academia. In PARTHENOS, European initiatives and projects in the area of the humanities and social sciences assembled to compare policies and procedures. One of the areas of interest is data management. The data management landscape shows a lot of proliferation, for which an abstraction level is introduced to help centres, such as CLARIN centres, in the process of providing the best possible services to users with data management needs.
We discovered several recurring errors in the current version of the Europarl Corpus originating both from the web site of the European Parliament and the corpus compilation based thereon. The most frequent error was incompletely extracted metadata leaving non-textual fragments within the textual parts of the corpus files. This is, on average, the case for every second speaker change. We not only cleaned the Europarl Corpus by correcting several kinds of errors, but also aligned the speakers’ contributions of all available languages and compiled every- thing into a new XML-structured corpus. This facilitates a more sophisticated selection of data, e.g. querying the corpus for speeches by speakers of a particular political group or in particular language combinations.
The paper presents best practices and results from projects dedicated to the creation of corpora of computer-mediated communication and social media interactions (CMC) from four different countries. Even though there are still many open issues related to building and annotating corpora of this type, there already exists a range of tested solutions which may serve as a starting point for a comprehensive discussion on how future standards for CMC corpora could (and should) be shaped like.
Since 2013 representatives of several French and German CMC corpus projects have developed three customizations of the TEI-P5 standard for text encoding in order to adapt the encoding schema and models provided by the TEI to the structural peculiarities of CMC discourse. Based on the three schema versions, a 4th version has been created which takes into account the experiences from encoding our corpora and which is specifically designed for the submission of a feature request to the TEI council. On our poster we would present the structure of this schema and its relations (commonalities and differences) to the previous schemas.
CMDI Explorer
(2021)
We present CMDI Explorer, a tool that empowers users to easily explore the contents of complex CMDI records and to process selected parts of them with little effort. The tool allows users, for instance, to analyse virtual collections represented by CMDI records, and to send collection items to other CLARIN services such as the Switchboard for subsequent processing. CMDI Explorer hence adds functionality that many users felt was lacking from the CLARIN tool space.
The paper’s purpose is to give an overview of the work on the Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) that was implemented in the CLARIN research infrastructure. It explains, the underlying schema, the accompanying tools and services. It also describes the status and impact of the CMDI developments done within the CLARIN project and past and future collaborations with other projects.
Co-reference annotation and resources: a multilingual corpus of typologically diverse languages
(2002)
This article introduces a dialogue corpus containing data from two typologically different languages, Japanese and Kilivila. The corpus is annotated in accordance with language specific annotation schemes for co-referential and similar relations. The article describes the corpus data, the properties of language specific co-reference in the two languages and a methodology for its annotation. Examples from the corpus show how this methodology is used in the workflow of the annotation process.
This paper describes a corpus of Japanese task-oriented dialogues, i.e. its data, annotations, analysis methodology and preliminary results for the modeling of co-referential phenomena. Current corpus based approaches to co-reference concentrate on textual data from English or other European languages. Hence, the emerging language-general models of co-reference miss input from dialogue data of non-European languages. We aim to fill this gap and contribute to a model of co-reference on various language-specific and language-general levels.
This paper discusses how cognitive aspects can be incorporated into lexicographic meaning descriptions based on corpus-driven analysis. The new German Online dictionary “Paronyme − Dynamisch im Kontrast” is concerned with easily confused words such as effektiv/effizient, sensibel/sensitiv. It is currently in the process of being developed and it aims at adopting a more conceptual and encyclopedic approach to meaning. Contrastive entries emphasize usage, comparing conceptual categories and indicating the mapping of knowledge. Adaptable access to lexicographic details offers different perspectives on information, and authentic examples reflect prototypical structures.
Some of the cognitive features are demonstrated with the help of examples. Firstly, I will outline how patterns of usage imply conceptual categories as central ideas instead of sufficiently logical criteria of semantic distinction. In this way, linguistic findings correlate better with how users conceptualize language. Secondly, it is pointed out how collocates are family members and fillers in contexts. Thirdly, I will demonstrate how contextual structure and function are included by summarizing referential information. Details are drawn from corpus data; they are usage-based patterns illustrating conversational interaction and semantic negotiation in contemporary public discourse. Finally, I will show flexible consultation routines where the focus on structural knowledge changes.
This paper shows how corpora and related tools can be used to analyse and present significant colligational patterns lexicographically. In German, patterns such as das nötige Wissen vermitteln and sein Wissen unter Beweis stellen play a vital role when learning the language, as they exhibit relevant idiomatic usage and lexical and syntactic rules of combination. Each item has specific semantic and grammatical functions and particular preferences with respect to position and distribution. An analysis of adjectives, for example, identifies preferences in adverbial, attributive, or predicative functions.
Traditionally, corpus analyses of syntagmatic constructions have not been conducted for lexicographic purposes. This paper shows how to utilise corpora to extract and examine typical syntagms and how the results of such an analysis are documented systematically in ELEXIKO, a large-scale corpus-based Internet reference work of German. It also demonstrates how this dictionary accounts for the lexical and grammatical interplay between units in a syntagm and how authentic corpus material and complementary prose-style usage notes are a useful guide to text production or reception.
The FrameNet lexical database yields information about collocations and multiword expressions in various ways. In some cases phrasal units have been entered from the start as lexical entries (write down). In other cases headword + preposition pairs can be recognized as special collocations Where the preposition in question is a necessary and lexically specified marker of an argument of the headword + fond of, hostile to). Nominal compounds are annotated with respect to noun or (pertinative) adjective modifiers, some of which are analyzable but also entrenched (wheel chair, fiscal year). Nouns that name aggregates, portions, types, etc., sometimes hold lexically specified relations to their dependents (flock of geese). And event nouns frequently Select the support verbs which permit them to enter into predications (file an objection, enter a plea). A subproject aims at extracting, as structured clusters of lexical items, the minimal semantically central kernel dependency graphs from the set of annotations. Such research will yield not only commonplace groupings (eat: dog, bone) but will also yield hitherto unnoticed collocations within such graphs (answer: you, door) where certain dependency links within them are idiomatic or otherwise lexically special, here answer > door. Collocational information can also be retrieved by various types of queries within our MySQL search tool
In this paper, semantic aspects of P1N1P2 word sequences will be discussed. Based on syntactic analysis of Trawinski (2003), which assumes prepositions heading P1N1P2NP combinations to be able to raise and realize syntactically complements of their arguments, we will investigate whether semantic representation of these expressions can be considered as an instance of the combinatorics semantics. We will investigate three German PPs involving expressions under consideration with respect to two criteria of internal semantic regularity adopted from Sailer (2000) and we will observe that the discussed expressions are not uniform with regard to the semantic properties. While the logical form of some of them can be computed by means of ordinary translations and a set of standard derivational operations, the other require additional handling methods. However, there are approaches available within the HPSG paradigm that are suited to account for these data. Here, we will briefly present the external selection approach of Soehn (2003) and the phrasal lexical entries approach of Sailer (2000) and we will show how they interact with the syntactic approach of Trawinski (2003).
We compare several different corpus- based and lexicon-based methods for the scalar ordering of adjectives. Among them, we examine for the first time a low- resource approach based on distinctive- collexeme analysis that just requires a small predefined set of adverbial modifiers. While previous work on adjective intensity mostly assumes one single scale for all adjectives, we group adjectives into different scales which is more faithful to human perception. We also apply the methods to both polar and non-polar adjectives, showing that not all methods are equally suitable for both types of adjectives.
Prominence has been widely studied on the word level and the syllable level. An extensive study comparing the two approaches is missing in the literature. This study investigates how word and syllable prominence relate to each other in German. We find that perceptual ratings based on the word level are more extreme than those based on the syllable level. The correlations between word prominence and acoustic features are greater than the correlations between syllable prominence and acoustic features.
This study examines the pitch profiles of French learners of German and German learners of French, both in their native language (L1), and in their respective foreign language (L2). Results of the analysis of 84 speakers suggest that for short read sentences, French and German speakers do not show pitch range differences in their native production. Furthermore, analyses of mean f0 and pitch range indicate that range is not necessarily reduced in L2 productions. These results are different from results reported in prior research. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed.
This study presents the results of a large-scale comparison of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two Slavic (Bulgarian and Polish) and two Germanic (German and British English) languages. The productions of twenty-two speakers per language (eleven male and eleven female) in two different tasks (read passages and number sets) are compared. Significant differences between the language groups are found: German and English speakers use lower pitch maxima, narrower pitch span, and generally less variable pitch than Bulgarian and Polish speakers. These findings support the hypothesis that inguistic communities tend to be characterized by particular pitch profiles.
This paper proposes a methodology for querying linguistic data represented in different corpus formats. Examples of the need for queries over such heterogeneous resources are the corpus-based analysis of multimodal phenomena like the interaction of gestures and prosodic features, or syntax-related phenomena like information structure which exceed the expressive power of a tree-centered corpus format. Query languages (QLs) currently under development are strongly connected to corpus formats, like the NITE Object Model (NOM, Carletta et al., 2003) or the Meta-Annotation Infrastructure for ATLAS (MAIA, Laprun and Fiscus, 2002). The parallel development of linguistic query languages and corpus formats is due to the fact that general purpose query languages like XQuery (Boag et al., 2003) do not fulfill the changing needs of linguistically motivated queries, e.g. to give access to (non-)hierarchically organized, theory and language dependent annotations of multi modal signals and/or text. This leads to the problem that existing corpus formats and query languages are hard to reuse. They have to be re developed and re-implemented time-consumingly and expensively for unforeseen tasks. This paper describes an approach for overcoming these problems and a sample application.
This contribution presents the newest version of our ’Wortverbindungsfelder’ (fields of multi-word expressions), an experimental lexicographic resource that focusses on aspects of MWEs that are rarely addressed in traditional descriptions: Contexts, patterns and interrelations. The MWE fields use data from a very large corpus of written German (over 6 billion word forms) and are created in a strictly corpus-based way. In addition to traditional lexicographic descriptions, they include quantitative corpus data which is structured in new ways in order to show the usage specifics. This way of looking at MWEs gives insight in the structure of language and is especially interesting for foreign language learners.
We present an approach to making existing CLARIN web services usable for spoken language transcriptions. Our approach is based on a new TEI-based ISO standard for such transcriptions. We show how existing tool formats can be transformed to this standard, how an encoder/decoder pair for the TCF format enables users to feed this type of data through a WebLicht tool chain, and why and how web services operating directly on the standard format would be useful.
Converting and Representing Social Media Corpora into TEI: Schema and best practices from CLARIN-D
(2016)
The paper presents results from a curation project within CLARIN-D, in which an existing lMWord corpus of German chat communication has been integrated into the DEREKO and DWDS corpus infrastructures of the CLARIN-D centres at the Institute for the German Language (IDS, Mannheim) and at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW, Berlin). The focus is on the solutions developed for converting and representing the corpus in a TEI format.
Opinion holder extraction is one of the important subtasks in sentiment analysis. The effective detection of an opinion holder depends on the consideration of various cues on various levels of representation, though they are hard to formulate explicitly as features. In this work, we propose to use convolution kernels for that task which identify meaningful fragments of sequences or trees by themselves. We not only investigate how different levels of information can be effectively combined in different kernels but also examine how the scope of these kernels should be chosen. In general relation extraction, the two candidate entities thought to be involved in a relation are commonly chosen to be the boundaries of sequences and trees. The definition of boundaries in opinion holder extraction, however, is less straightforward since there might be several expressions beside the candidate opinion holder to be eligible for being a boundary.
In this paper, we explore different linguistic structures encoded as convolution kernels for the detection of subjective expressions. The advantage of convolution kernels is that complex structures can be directly provided to a classifier without deriving explicit features. The feature design for the detection of subjective expressions is fairly difficult and there currently exists no commonly accepted feature set. We consider various structures, such as constituency parse structures, dependency parse structures, and predicate-argument structures. In order to generalize from lexical information, we additionally augment these structures with clustering information and the task-specific knowledge of subjective words. The convolution kernels will be compared with a standard vector kernel.
In Articulatory Phonology the jaw is not controlled individually but serves as an additional articulator to achieve the primary constriction. In this study the timing of jaw and tongue tip gestures for the coronal consonants /s, , t, d, n, l/ is analysed by means of EMMA. The findings suggest that the tasks of the jaw for the fricatives are to provide a second noise source and to stabilise the tongue position (more pronounced for /s/). For the voiceless stop, the speakers seem to aim at a high jaw position for producing a prominent burst. For /l/ a low jaw position is essential for avoiding lateral contact and for the apical articulation of this sound.
This article reports on the on-going CoRoLa project, aiming at creating a reference corpus of contemporary Romanian (from 1945 onwards), opened for online free exploitation by researchers in linguistics and language processing, teachers of Romanian, students. We invest serious efforts in persuading large publishing houses and other owners of IPR on relevant language data to join us and contribute the project with selections of their text and speech repositories. The CoRoLa project is coordinated by two Computer Science institutes of the Romanian Academy, but enjoys cooperation of and consulting from professional linguists from other institutes of the Romanian Academy. We foresee a written component of the corpus of more than 500 million word forms, and a speech component of about 300 hours of recordings. The entire collection of texts (covering all functional styles of the language) will be pre-processed and annotated at several levels, and also documented with standardized metadata. The pre-processing includes cleaning the data and harmonising the diacritics, sentence splitting and tokenization. Annotation will include morpho-lexical tagging and lemmatization in the first stage, followed by syntactic, semantic and discourse annotation in a later stage.