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Question Answering Systems for retrieving information from Knowledge Graphs (KG) have become a major area of interest in recent years. Current systems search for words and entities but cannot search for grammatical phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to present our research on developing a QA System that answers natural language questions about German grammar.
Our goal is to build a KG which contains facts and rules about German grammar, and is also able to answer specific questions about a concrete grammatical issue. An overview of the current research in the topic of QA systems and ontology design is given and we show how we plan to construct the KG by integrating the data in the grammatical information system Grammis, hosted by the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS). In this paper, we describe the construction of the initial KG, sketch our resulting graph, and demonstrate the effectiveness of such an approach. A grammar correction component will be part of a later stage. The paper concludes with the potential areas for future research.
Wolfgang von Kempelen's book "The Mechanism of Human Speech" from 1791 is a famous milestone in the history of speech communication research. It has an enormous relevance for the phonetic sciences and it marks an important turning point for the development of the (mechanical) speech synthesis. So far no English version of this work was available, which excludes many interested researchers. Access to the original versions in German and French is restricted for various reasons. For example the blackletter script of the German version is troublesome for most of today's readers. We report here on a new edition of Kempelen's book which unites a better readable German version and its English translation. It will now also be in a searchable electronic format and has been enriched with many commentaries, which aid in the understanding of details of the late 18th century that are little known or unknown to many researchers today.
There are a number of recent replicas of Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine. Although all of them are explicitly based on Kempelen's own description nearly none of them are identical in construction and sound. In this paper we want to illustrate some of these differences and their reasons for five replicas built by ourselves.
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
The paper reports on the results of a scientific colloquium dedicated to the creation of standards and best practices which are needed to facilitate the integration of language resources for CMC stemming from different origins and the linguistic analysis of CMC phenomena in different languages and genres. The key issue to be solved is that of interoperability – with respect to the structural representation of CMC genres, linguistic annotations metadata, and anonymization/pseudonymization schemas. The objective of the paper is to convince more projects to partake in a discussion about standards for CMC corpora and for the creation of a CMC corpus infrastructure across languages and genres. In view of the broad range of corpus projects which are currently underway all over Europe, there is a great window of opportunity for the creation of standards in a bottom-up approach.
As a consequence of a recent curation project, the Dortmund Chat Corpus is available in CLARIN-D research infrastructures for download and querying. In a legal expertise it had been recommended that standard measures of anonymisation be applied to the corpus before its republication. This paper reports about the anonymisation campaign that was conducted for the corpus. Anonymisation has been realised as categorisation, and the taxonomy of anonymisation categories applied is introduced and the method of applying it to the TEI files is demonstrated. The results of the anonymisation campaign as well as issues of quality assessment are discussed. Finally, pseudonymisation as an alternative to categorisation as a method of the anonymisation of CMC data is discussed, as well as possibilities of an automatisation of the process.
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.
Prosodic constructions used to compete for the speaking turn in conversation have been widely studied (French & Local (1983), Kurtić et al. (2013)). Usually, turn competition arises in overlapping talk between at least two speakers. Coordination between participants in their prosodic design of talk (Szczepek-Reed, 2006) and social action (Gorisch et al. 2012), as well as entrainment in more general terms (Levitan et al. 2011), is well established in the literature. Nevertheless, previous studies on turn competition and overlap do not investigate the prosodic design of turn competitive incomings in reference to the orientation of the speakers to each other. Rather, they assume that prosodic constructions are used for turn competition regardless of the co-participants’ design of the turn. In this paper, we ask whether the prosodic design of turn competitive talk is co-constructed between two participants talking in overlap. More specifically, we investigate whether the prosodic design of one participant’s in overlap talk is developed with respect to the interlocutor’s prosodic features during the same portion of overlapped talk, and whether this prosodic matching can discriminate between the overlaps that are competitive and those that are not. 183 Our analyses are based on two-speaker overlaps drawn from a corpus of multi-party face-to face conversation between four friends recorded in British English (Kurtic et al. 2012). 3407 instances of twospeaker overlaps have been extracted from 4 hours of talk. Two independent conversation analysts performed the interactional categorisation of overlaps into competitive and non-competitive for all these two-speaker overlap instances and achieved a good agreement of alpha=0.807 (Krippendorff 2004) as measured on a subset of 808 overlaps selected for our initial analysis. For the analysis of prosodic features we focus on F0 related features: mean, slope, span and contour, all of which have previously been shown to be used by each overlapping speaker separately for turn competition (Kurtic et al. 2009; Oertel et al. 2012). We investigate the similarity in F0 mean, slope and span by correlating these features across the two participants. For F0 contour, a similarity coefficient is computed using dynamic programming method described in Gorisch et al. (2012). We consider the difference in F0 contour similarity in competitive and non-competitive overlaps as an indication of intonational matching being a turn competitive resource. We conduct these analyses for overlaps that are clearly competitive or noncompetitive as indicated by inter-annotator agreement. In addition, we qualitatively explore those cases that annotators disagree on in order to investigate whether they reveal further important interactional or prosodic features of in-overlap talk. Our preliminary results suggest that conversational participants attend and adapt to the interlocutor during overlap depending on whether they return competition or not. We explain our findings in relation to previous work on turn competition in overlap, discuss the quantitative method employed and also address the possible consequences of our results for the study of prosodic realization of other social actions in conversation.
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.
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.
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.
The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of combining conversation analysis and ethnography in the study of everyday family life. We argue that such a combination requires the decision whether to prioritise interaction data or ethno-graphic (in particular, interview) data in the analysis. We present a conversation analytic case study of how household work is commonly brought up in the interactions of one couple and bring this to bear on a re-analysis of a possible conflict situation originally described in the ethnographic analysis by Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury (2007), published in this journal. While the findings of the two analyses converge, they inform us about different dimensions of couple interaction. The ethnographic analysis is focused on participants’ experiences, and the conversation analysis is focused on participants’ practices. We conclude that the methodological decision to prioritise interaction or interview data has consequences for the kind of questions we can ask.
We provide a unified account of semantic effects observable in attested examples of the German applicative (‘be-’) construction, e.g. Rollstuhlfahrer Poul Sehachsen aus Kopenhagen will den 1997 erschienenen Wegweiser Handiguide Europa fortführen und zusammen mit Movado Berlin berollen (‘Wheelchair user Poul Schacksen from Copenhagen wants to continue the guide ‘Handiguide Europe’, which came out in 1997, and roll Berlin together with Movado.’). We argue that these effects do not come from lexico-semantic operations on ‘input’ verbs, but are instead the products of a reconciliation procedure in which the meaning of the verb is integrated into the event-structure schema denoted by the applicative construction. We analyze the applicative pattern as an argument-structure construction, in terms of Goldberg (1995). We contrast this approach with that of Brinkmann (1997), in which properties associated with the applicative pattern (e.g. omissibility of the theme argument, holistic interpretation of the goal argument, and planar construal of the location argument) are attributed to general semantico-pragmatic principles. We undermine the generality of the principles as stated, and assert that these properties are instead construction-particular. We further argue that the constructional account provides an elegant model of the valence-creation and valence-augmentation functions of the prefix. We describe the constructional semantics as prototype-based: diverse implications of fee-predications, including iteration, transfer, affectedness, intensity and saturation, derive via regular patterns of semantic extension from the topological concept of coverage.
Ein integriertes Datenbank-, Such- und Tagging-Tool (IDaSTo) wird vorgestellt, das sich besonders für Variablenanalysen, für Paralleltexte und für diachronische Untersuchungen eignet. Relevante Kategorien bzw. Variablen können individuell definiert, Tags frei im Text und auf verschiedenen Wegen gesetzt und ihre Häufigkeiten in den verlinkten Statistiken direkt abgerufen werden.
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis.
When a noise verb is used to indicate verbal communication, factors from both the source domain of the verb (perception) and the target domain (communication) play a role in determining the argument structure of the sentence. While the target domain supplies a syntactic structure, the source domain’s semantics constrain the degree to which that syntactic structure can be exploited. This can be determined by comparing noise verbs in this use with manner-of-communication verbs, which are superficially similar, but native to communication. Data for these two classes of verbs were drawn from the British National Corpus. The data were annotated with frame-semantic markup, as described in the Berkeley FrameNet Project. We compared the presence, type of syntactic realization, and position of the semantically annotated arguments for both classes of verbs. We found that noise and manner verbs show statistically significant differences in these three areas. For instance, noise verbs are more focused on the form of the message than manner verbs: noise verbs appear more frequently with a quoted message. In addition, there are differences other than the complementation patterns: certain noise verbs are biased with respect to speakers’ genders, message types, and even orthography in quoted messages
We provide a unified account of semantic effects observable in attested examples of the German applicative (‘be-’) construction, e.g. Rollstuhlfahrer Poul Sehachsen aus Kopenhagen will den 1997 erschienenen Wegweiser Handiguide Europa fortführen und zusammen mit Movado Berlin berollen (‘Wheelchair user Poul Schacksen from Copenhagen wants to continue the guide ‘Handiguide Europe’, which came out in 1997, and roll Berlin together with Movado.’). We argue that these effects do not come from lexico-semantic operations on ‘input’ verbs, but are instead the products of a reconciliation procedure in which the meaning of the verb is integrated into the event-structure schema denoted by the applicative construction. We analyze the applicative pattern as an argument-structure construction, in terms of Goldberg (1995). We contrast this approach with that of Brinkmann (1997), in which properties associated with the applicative pattern (e.g. omissibility of the theme argument, holistic interpretation of the goal argument, and planar construal of the location argument) are attributed to general semantico-pragmatic principles. We undermine the generality of the principles as stated, and assert that these properties are instead construction-particular. We further argue that the constructional account provides an elegant model of the valence-creation and valence-augmentation functions of the prefix. We describe the constructional semantics as prototype-based: diverse implications of fee-predications, including iteration, transfer, affectedness, intensity and saturation, derive via regular patterns of semantic extension from the topological concept of coverage.
Some structures in printed dictionaries also occur in online dictionaries, some do not occur, some need to be adapted whereas new structures may be introduced in online dictionaries. This paper looks at one type of structure, known in printed dictionaries as outer texts. It is argued that the notions of a frame structure and front and back matter texts do not apply to online dictionaries. The data distribution in online dictionaries does not only target the dictionary articles. There are components outside the word list section of the dictionary. These components are not always texts. They could e.g. also be video clips. Consequently the notion of outer texts in printed dictionaries is substituted by the notion of outer features in online dictionaries. This paper shows how outer features help to constitute a feature compound. The outer features in eight online dictionaries are discussed. Where the users guidelines text is a compulsory outer text in printed dictionaries it seems that an equivalent feature is often eschewed in online dictionaries. A distinction is made between dictionary-internal and dictionary-external outer features, illustrating that outer features can be situated in other sources than the specific dictionary. More research is needed to formulate models for online features that can play a comprehensive role in online dictionaries.
As the nature of negative polarity items (NPIs) and their licensing contexts is still under much debate, a broad empirical basis is an important cornerstone to support further insights in this area of research. The work discussed in this paper is intended as a contribution to realizing this objective. The authors briefly introduce the phenomenon of NPIs and outline major theories about their licensing and also various licensing contexts before discussing our major topics: Firstly, a corpus-based retrieval method for NPI candidates is described that ranks the candidates according to their distributional dependence on the licensing contexts. Our method extracts single-word candidates and is extended to also capture multi-word candidates. The basic idea for automatically collecting NPI candidates from a large corpus is that an NPI behaves like a kind of collocate to its licensing contexts. Manual inspection and interpretation of the candidate lists identify the actual NPIs. Secondly, an online repository for NPIs and other items that show distributional idiosyncrasies is presented, which offers an empirical database for further (theoretical) research on these items in a sustainable way.
Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: I will focus on one crucial step in von Glasersfeld’s argumentation, viz. his view that every individual constructs his own private meanings (understood as conceptual structures or elements thereof) for linguistic expressions, so that linguistic interaction and even communication in general is based on a notion of compatibility between different speakers’ private conceptual schemes. The central question here is: “Just what does it mean that different private conceptual schemes (private meanings) are compatible, or what constitutes a viable criterion to this end?” As von Glasersfeld himself stresses twice (§28, §37), the criteria to be looked for can only be “public,” residing in properties of verbal and non-verbal actions of the interacting individuals, properties that can be sensed and processed by the participating system.
This contribution offers a fine-grained analysis of German and Romanian ditransitive and prepositional transfer constructions. The transfer construction (TC) is shown to be realised in German by 26 argument structure patterns (ASPs), which are conceived of as form-meaning pairings which differ only minimally. The mainstream constructionist view of the different types of TCs being related by polysemy links is rejected, the ASPs being argued instead to be related by family relationships. All but six of the ASPs identified for German are shown to possess a Romanian counterpart. For some ditransitive structures, German is shown to possess two prepositional variants, one with an (‘at’) and one with zu (‘to’) or auf (‘on’), while Romanian has only one. Due to the lack of a Romanian counterpart for the German zu and auf variants, Romanian lacks some of the dative alternations found in German. However, Romanian as well as German permits the double object pattern to interact with take-verbs, verbs of removal and add-verbs, which do not allow the ditransitive construction in English. Since these verb classes also permit at least one prepositional pattern in both languages, Romanian and German show a larger number of dative alternation types than English.