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Die Idee hinter dem Projekt – einen schnellen und einfachen Einstieg in die Analyse großer Korpusdaten mittels CorpusExplorer geben. Diese frei verfügbare Software bietet aktuell über 45 Analysen/Visualisierungen für vielfältige korpuslinguistische Zwecke und ist durch ihre Nutzerfreundlichkeit auch für den Einsatz in der universitären Lehre geeignet. Als Beispiel dient das EuroParl-Korpus, man kann aber auch eigenes Textmaterial (z. B. Textdateien, eBooks, Xml, Twitter, Blogs, etc.) mit dem CorpusExplorer annotieren, analysieren und visualisieren. Die Videos zeigen Schritt-für-Schritt die einzelnen Funktionen.
Überspannt werden die Videos von einer kleinen zweistufigen Aufgabe: Zuerst sollten ein paar Fragen/Thesen/Annahmen überlegt werden, die sich mit den Plenarprotokollen des EuroParl auswerten lassen – einige Videos geben auch explizite Anregungen oder man nutzt die Inspiration der anderen Beiträge im Issue #3. Die einfachsten Fragen/Thesen lassen sich bereits mit den hier vorgestellten Videos beantworten. Sobald es komplexer wird, betritt man den zweiten – reflexiven Teil der überspannenden Aufgabe: Es ist zu überlegen, wie durch (mehrfache) Kombination der einzelnen Video-/Wissensbausteine das Ziel erreicht werden kann (ein Beispiel – siehe Script). Im Zweifelsfall stehen außerdem ein Handbuch und ein E-Mail Support zur Verfügung.
Der vorliegende Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit einigen Aspekten der variationistischen Annotation von Korpusdaten. Anhand von mehreren Beispielen wird gezeigt, dass der Vergleich von Kategorien in einem Korpus oder der Vergleich von zwei Korpora nur unter bestimmten Bedingungen variationistisch interpretiert werden kann. Da die Definition von Variablen oft schwierig ist und die Zuordnung von Varianten zu Variablen je nach Forschungsfrage unterschiedlich sein kann, müssen Variablen und Varianten in einem Korpus (für alle transparent und nachvollziehbar) annotiert werden. Dabei wird für eine offene Korpusarchitektur argumentiert, in der in einem bestehenden Korpus jederzeit Variablen und Varianten hinzugefügt werden können.
The possibilities of re-use and archiving of spoken and written corpora are affected by personality rights (depending on legal tradition also called: the right of publicity), copyright law and data protection / privacy laws. These recommendations include information about legal aspects which should be considered while creating corpora to ensure the greatest archivability and re-usability possible in compliance with current laws.
The information compiled here shall serve researchers who plan to create corpora or who are involved in evaluation of such measures as a guideline. This information is not exhaustive or to be considered as legal advice. Researchers should consult institutional legal departments and management before making legally relevant decisions. That said, further legal expertise should be sought if possible as early as project planning phases.
In the NLP literature, adapting a parser to new text with properties different from the training data is commonly referred to as domain adaptation. In practice, however, the differences between texts from different sources often reflect a mixture of domain and genre properties, and it is by no means clear what impact each of those has on statistical parsing. In this paper, we investigate how differences between articles in a newspaper corpus relate to the concepts of genre and domain and how they influence parsing performance of a transition-based dependency parser. We do this by applying various similarity measures for data point selection and testing their adequacy for creating genre-aware parsing models.
In the NLP literature, adapting a parser to new text with properties different from the training data is commonly referred to as domain adaptation. In practice, however, the differences between texts from different sources often reflect a mixture of domain and genre properties, and it is by no means clear what impact each of those has on statistical parsing. In this paper, we investigate how differences between articles in a newspaper corpus relate to the concepts of genre and domain and how they influence parsing performance of a transition-based dependency parser. We do this by applying various similarity measures for data point selection and testing their adequacy for creating genre-aware parsing models.
Am 1. September 2016 hat das Forschungsprojekt „Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch“ (= LeGeDe) am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim als Kooperationsprojekt der Abteilungen Pragmatik und Lexik seine Arbeit aufgenommen. Dieses drittmittelgeförderte Projekt der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (Leibniz-Wettbewerb 2016; Förderlinie 1: Innovative Vorhaben) hat eine Laufzeit von drei Jahren (1.9.2016-31.8.2019) und besteht aus einem Team von Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern aus den Bereichen Lexikologie, Lexikografie, Gesprächsforschung, Korpus- und Computerlinguistik sowie Empirische Methoden. Im folgenden Beitrag werden neben Informationen zu den Eckdaten des Projekts, zu den unterschiedlichen Ausgangspunkten, dem Gegenstandsbereich, den Zielen sowie der LeGeDe-Datengrundlage vor allem einige grundlegende Forschungsfragen und methodologische Ansätze aufgezeigt sowie erste Vorschläge zur Gewinnung, Analyse und Strukturierung der Daten präsentiert. Zur lexikografischen Umsetzung werden verschiedene Möglichkeiten skizziert und im Ausblick einige Herausforderungen zusammengefasst.
This paper argues for using authentic data not only as an empirical basis for linguistic generalizations but also for exemplification purposes in monolingual and particularly in bi- and multilingual contrastive studies. It shows that parallel data extracted from the available parallel corpora can - after enrichment with semantic-functional information while maintaining the available contextual, register-related and linguistic information - serve as a perfect data source for multilingual exemplification. Moreover, the analysis of semantic-functionally equivalent parallel sequences allows the investigation and exemplification of similarities and differences in how different languages express similar meaning from both a semasiological and an onomasiological perspective.
In my talk, I present an empirical approach to detecting and describing proverbs as frozen sentences with specific functions in current language use. We have developed this approach in the EU project ‘SprichWort’ (based on the German Reference Corpus). The first chapter illustrates selected aspects of our complex, iterative procedure to validate proverb candidates. Based on our corpus-driven lexpan methodology of slot analysis I then discuss semantic restrictions of proverb patterns. Furthermore, I show different degrees of proverb quality ranging from genuine proverbs to non-proverb realizations of the same abstract pattern. On the one hand, the corpus validation reveals that proverbs are definitely perceived and used as relatively fixed entities and often as sentences. On the other hand, proverbs are not only interpreted as an interesting unique phenomenon but also as part of the whole lexicon, embedded in networks of different lexical items.
Sprichwörter im Gebrauch
(2017)
Mit diesem Bild beschreibt Hermann Unterstöger in einem „Sprachlabor“- Artikel der Süddeutschen Zeitung vom 23.3.2013 die Erfolgsgeschichte, die das Substantiv (das) Narrativ in den letzten 30 Jahren vorgelegt hat. Während Unterstöger feinsinnig den intertextuellen Bezug zum „Narrenschiff“ des Sebastian Brant oder dem gleichnamigen Roman von Katherine Ann Porter bemüht, wird Matthias Heine, der Autor von „Seit wann hat geil nichts mehr mit Sex zu tun? 100 deutsche Wörter und ihre erstaunlichen Karrieren“ in einem Artikel in der WELT vom 13.11.2016, wie nach diesem Buchtitel zu erwarten, eher grob: Dort heißt es: „Hinz und Kunz schwafeln heutzutage vom ,Narrativ‘“.
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.
In this paper we present the results of an automatic classification of Russian texts into three levels of difficulty. Our aim is to build a study corpus of Russian, in which a L2 student is able to select texts of a desired complexity. We are building on a pilot study, in which we classified Russian texts into two levels of difficulty. In the current paper, we apply the classification to an extended corpus of 577 labelled texts. The best-performing combination of features achieves an accuracy of 0,74 within at most one level difference.
Die Beiträge dieses Tagungsbandes thematisieren die Erstellung digitaler historischer Zeitungskorpora, Merkmale und Entwicklungstendenzen der Sprache der Zeitungen auf verschiedenen Ebenen und auf der Grundlage einzelner Korpora sowie die Bewertung der Zeitungssprache aus zeitgenössischer Sicht.
Die Vorträge gehen zurück auf den Workshop "Die Zeitung als das Medium der neueren Sprachgeschichte? Korpora, Analyse und Wirkung" am Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) - in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Europäischen Zentrum für Sprachwissenschaften (EZS) - am 20./21.11.2014 in Mannheim.
We present a method to identify and document a phenomenon on which there is very little empirical data: German phrasal compounds occurring in the form of as a single token (without punctuation between their components). Relying on linguistic criteria, our approach implies to have an operational notion of compounds which can be systematically applied as well as (web) corpora which are large and diverse enough to contain rarely seen phenomena. The method is based on word segmentation and morphological analysis, it takes advantage of a data-driven learning process. Our results show that coarse-grained identification of phrasal compounds is best performed with empirical data, whereas fine-grained detection could be improved with a combination of rule-based and frequency-based word lists. Along with the characteristics of web texts, the orthographic realizations seem to be linked to the degree of expressivity.
This paper gives an insight into the basic concepts for a corpus-based lexical resource of spoken German, which is being developed by the project "The Lexicon of Spoken German"(Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe) at the "Institute for the German Language" (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, IDS) in Mannheim. The focus of the paper is on initial ideas of semi-automatic and automatic resources that assist the quantitative analysis of the corpus data for the creation of dictionary content. The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German" (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK).
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.
Making 1:n explorable: a search interface for the ZAS database of clause-embedding predicates
(2017)
We introduce a recently published corpus-based database of German clause-embedding predicates and present an innovative web application for exploring it. The application displays the predicates and the corpus examples for these predicates in two separate tables that can be browsed and searched in real time. While familiar web interface paradigms make it easy for users to get started, the data presentation and the interactive advanced search components for the two tables are designed to accommodate remarkably complex query needs without the need for resorting to a dedicated query language or a more specialized tool. The 1:n relationship between predicates and their examples is exploited in the two tables in that, e.g. the predicate table also shows, for each predicate and each example attribute, all values that occur in the examples for this predicate. An easy-to-use visual query builder for arbitrary Boolean combinations of search criteria can optionally be displayed to pre-filter the underlying data presented in both tables. Several options for altering quantifier scope can be activated with simple checkboxes and considerably widen the space of searchable constellations.
CoMParS is a resource under construction in the context of the long-term project German Grammar in European Comparison (GDE) at the IDS Mannheim. The principal goal of GDE is to create a novel contrastive grammar of German against the background of other European languages. Alongside German, which is the central focus, the core languages for comparison are English, French, Hungarian and Polish, representing different typological classes. Unlike traditional contrastive grammars available for German, which usually cover language pairs and are based on formal grammatical categories, the new GDE grammar is developed in the spirit of functionalist typology. This implies that, instead of formal criteria, cognitively motivated functional domains in terms of Givón (1984) are used as tertia comparationis. The purpose of CoMParS is to document the empirical basis of the theoretical assumptions of GDE-V and to illustrate the otherwise rather abstract content of grammar books by as many as possible naturally occurring and adequately presented multilingual examples, including information on their use in specific contexts and registers. These examples come from existing parallel corpora, and our presentation will focus on the legal aspects and consequences of this choice of language data.
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.
Contents:
1. Andreas Dittrich: Intra-connecting a small exemplary literary corpus with semantic web technologies for exploratory literary studies, S. 1
2. John Kirk, Anna Čermáková: From ICE to ICC: The new International Comparable Corpus, S. 7
3. Dawn Knight, Tess Fitzpatrick, Steve Morris, Jeremy Evas, Paul Rayson, Irena Spasic, Mark Stonelake, Enlli Môn Thomas, Steven Neale, Jennifer Needs, Scott Piao, Mair Rees, Gareth Watkins, Laurence Anthony, Thomas Michael Cobb, Margaret Deuchar, Kevin Donnelly, Michael McCarthy, Kevin Scannell: Creating CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes – The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh), S. 13
4. Marc Kupietz, Andreas Witt, Piotr Bański, Dan Tufiş, Dan Cristea, Tamás Váradi: EuReCo - Joining Forces for a European Reference Corpus as a sustainable base for cross-linguistic research, S. 15
5. Harald Lüngen, Marc Kupietz: CMC Corpora in DeReKo, S. 20
6. David McClure, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Douris Steele, Erik Fredner, Hannah Walser: Organizing corpora at the Stanford Literary Lab, S. 25
7. Radoslav Rábara, Pavel Rychlý ,Ondřej Herman: Accelerating corpus search using multiple cores, S. 30
8. John Vidler, Stephen Wattam: Keeping Properties with the Data: CL-MetaHeaders – An Open Specification, S. 35
9. Vladimir Benko: Are Web Corpora Inferior? The Case of Czech and Slovak, S. 43
10. Edyta Jurkiewicz-Rohrbacher, Zrinka Kolaković, Björn Hansen: Web Corpora – the best possible solution for tracking phenomena in underresourced languages: clitics in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, S. 49
11. Vít Suchomel: Removing Spam from Web Corpora Through Supervised Learning Using FastText, S. 56
Unlike traditional text corpora collected from trustworthy sources, the content of web based corpora has to be filtered. This study briefly discusses the impact of web spam on corpus usability and emphasizes the importance of removing computer generated text from web corpora.
The paper also presents a keyword comparison of an unfiltered corpus with the same collection of texts cleaned by a supervised classifier trained using FastText. The classifier was able to recognize 71% of web spam documents similar to the training set but lacked both precision and recall when applied to short texts from another data set.
Complex linguistic phenomena, such as Clitic Climbing in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, are often described intuitively, only from the perspective of the main tendency. In this paper, we argue that web corpora currently offer the best source of empirical material for studying Clitic Climbing in BCS. They thus allow the most accurate description of this phenomenon, as less frequent constructions can be tracked only in big, well-annotated data sources. We compare the properties of web corpora for BCS with traditional sources and give examples of studies on CC based on web corpora. Furthermore, we discuss problems related to web corpora and suggest some improvements for the future.
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.
Creating CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh)
(2017)
CorCenCC is an interdisciplinary and multiinstitutional project that is creating a large-scale, open-source corpus of contemporary Welsh. CorCenCC will be the first ever large-scale corpus to represent spoken, written and electronicallymediated Welsh (compiling an initial data set of 10 million Welsh words), with a functional design informed, from the outset, by representatives of all anticipated academic and community user groups.
Corpus researchers, along with many other disciplines in science are being put under continual pressure to show accountability and reproducibility in their work. This is unsurprisingly difficult when the researcher is faced with a wide array of methods and tools through which to do their work; simply tracking the operations done can be problematic, especially when toolchains are often configured by the developers, but left largely as a black box to the user. Here we present a scheme for encoding this ‘meta data’ inside the corpus files themselves in a structured data format, along with a proof-of-concept tool to record the operations performed on a file.
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 article describes a series of ongoing efforts at the Stanford Literary Lab to manage a large collection of literary corpora (~40 billion words). This work is marked by a tension between two competing requirements – the corpora need to be merged together into higher-order collections that can be analyzed as units; but, at the same time, it’s also necessary to preserve granular access to the original metadata and relational organization of each individual corpus. We describe a set of data management practices that try to accommodate both of these requirements – Apache Spark is used to index data as Parquet tables on an HPC cluster at Stanford. Crucially, the approach distinguishes between what we call “canonical” and “combined” corpora, a variation on the well-established notion of a “virtual corpus” (Kupietz et al., 2014; Jakubíek et al., 2014; van Uytvanck, 2010).
This paper outlines the broad research context and rationale for a new international comparable corpus (ICC). The ICC is to be largely modelled on the text categories and their quantities the International Corpus of English with only a few changes. The corpus will initially begin with nine European languages but others may join in due course. The paper reports on those and other agreements made at the inaugural planning meeting in Prague on 22-23 June 2017. It also sets out the project’s goals for its first two years.
Many (modernist) works of literature can be understood by their associativeness, be it constructed or “free”. This network-like character of (modernist) literature has often been addressed by terms like “free association”, connotation”, “context” or “intertext”. This paper proposes an experimental and exemplary approach to intraconnect a literary corpus of the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger with semantic web-technologies to enable interactive explorations of word-associations.
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.
Wie können Diskursmarker in einem Korpus gesprochener Sprache auffindbar gemacht werden? Was ist Part-of-Speech-Tagging und wie funktioniert es? In diesem Artikel soll anhand der POS-Kategorie Diskursmarker dargestellt werden, wie für das Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) ein Part-of-Speech-Tagging entwickelt wurde, das auf die Annotation typisch gesprochen-sprachlicher Phänomene ausgerichtet ist. Diskursmarker sollen dafür aus der Sicht maschineller Sprachverarbeitung dargestellt werden, d. h. wie eine POS-Kategorie Diskursmarker so definiert werden kann, dass sie automatisch annotiert werden kann. Schließlich soll gezeigt werden, wie man auch weitere Diskursmarker in der Datenbank auffinden kann
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.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/ cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005. 1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.
Lexicographic meaning descriptions of German lexical items which are formally and semantically similar and therefore easily confused (so-called paronyms) often do not reflect their current usage of lexical items. They can even contradict one’s personal intuition or disagree with lexical usage as observed in public discourse. The reasons are manifold. Language data used for compiling dictionaries is either outdated, or lexicographic practice is rather conventional and does not take advantage of corpus-assisted approaches to semantic analysis. Despite of various modern electronic or online reference works speakers face uncertainties when dealing with easily confusable words. These are for example sensibel/sensitiv (sensitive) or kindisch/kindlich (childish/childlike). Existing dictionaries often do not provide satisfactory answers as to how to use these sets correctly. Numerous questions addressed in online forums show where uncertainties with paronyms are and why users demand further assistance concerning proper contextual usage (cf. Storjohann 2015). There are different reasons why users misuse certain items or mix up words which are similar in form and meaning. As data from written and more spontaneous language resources suggest, some confusions arise due to ongoing semantic change in the current use of some paronyms. This paper identifies shortcomings of contemporary German Dictionaries and discusses innovative ways of empirical lexicographic work that might pave the way for a new data-driven, descriptive reference work of confusable German terms. Currently, such a guide is being developed at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim implementing corpora and diverse corpus-analytical methods. Its objective is to compile a dictionary with contrastive entries which is a useful reference tool in situation of language doubt. At the same time, it aims at sensitizing users of context dependency and language change.
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.
In this paper, an exploratory data-driven method is presented that extracts word-types from diachronic corpora that have undergone the most pronounced change in frequency of occurrence in a given period of time. Combined with statistical methods from time series analysis, the method is able to find meaningful patterns and relationships in diachronic corpora, an idea that is still uncommon in linguistics. This indicates that the approach can facilitate an improved understanding of diachronic processes.
Die Guidelines sind eine Erweiterung des STTS (Schiller et al. 1999) für die Annotation von Transkripten gesprochener Sprache. Dieses Tagset basiert auf der Annotation des FOLK-Korpus des IDS Mannheim (Schmidt 2014) und es wurde gegenüber dem STTS erweitert in Hinblick auf typisch gesprochensprachliche Phänomene bzw. Eigenheiten der Transkription derselben. Es entstand im Rahmen des Dissertationsprojekts „POS für(s) FOLK – Entwicklung eines automatisierten Part-of-Speech-Tagging von spontansprachlichen Daten“ (Westpfahl 2017 (i.V.)).
Standardisierte statistische Auswertungen von Korpusdaten im Projekt "Korpusgrammatik" (KoGra-R)
(2017)
Wir zeigen anhand dreier Beispielanalysen, wie das im IDS-Projekt „Korpusgrammatik“ entwickelte Auswertungstool KoGra-R in der quantitativlinguistischen Forschung zur Analyse von Frequenzdaten auf mehreren linguistischen Ebenen eingesetzt werden kann. Wir demonstrieren dies anhand regionaler Präferenzen bei der Selektion von Genitivallomorphen, der Variation von Relativpronomina sowie der Verwendung bestimmter anaphorischer Ausdrucke in Abhängigkeit davon, ob sich das Antezedens im gleichen Satz befindet oder nicht. Die in KoGra-R implementierten statistischen Tests sind für jede dieser Ebenen geeignet, um mindestens einen ersten statistisch abgesicherten Eindruck der Datenlage zu erlangen.
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.
Eine reichhaltige Auszeichnung mit Metadaten ist für alle Arten von Korpora für die linguistische Forschung wünschenswert. Für große Korpora (insbesondere Webkorpora) müssen Metadaten automatisch erzeugt werden, wobei die Genauigkeit der Auszeichnung besonders kritisch ist. Wir stellen einen Ansatz zur automatischen Klassifikation nach Themengebiet (Topikdomäne) vor, die auf dem lexikalischen Material in Texten basiert. Dazu überführen wir weniger gut interpretierbare Ergebnisse aus einer so genannten Topikmodellierung mittels eines überwachten Lernverfahrens in eine besser interpretierbare Kategorisierung nach 13 Themengebieten. Gegenüber (automatisch erzeugten) Klassifikationen nach Genre, Textsorte oder Register, die zumeist auf Verteilungen grammatischer Merkmale basieren, erscheint eine solche thematische Klassifikation geeigneter, um zusätzliche Kontrollvariablen für grammatische Variationsstudien bereitzustellen. Wir evaluieren das Verfahren auf Webtexten aus DECOW14 und Zeitungstexten aus DeReKo, für die jeweils getrennte Goldstandard-Datensätze manuell annotiert wurden.
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 Google Ngram Corpora seem to offer a unique opportunity to study linguistic and cultural change in quantitative terms. To avoid breaking any copyright laws, the data sets are not accompanied by any metadata regarding the texts the corpora consist of. Some of the consequences of this strategy are analyzed in this article. I chose the example of measuring censorship in Nazi Germany, which received widespread attention and was published in a paper that accompanied the release of the Google Ngram data (Michel et al. (2010): Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014): 176–82). I show that without proper metadata, it is unclear whether the results actually reflect any kind of censorship at all. Collectively, the findings imply that observed changes in this period of time can only be linked directly to World War II to a certain extent. Therefore, instead of speaking about general linguistic or cultural change, it seems to be preferable to explicitly restrict the results to linguistic or cultural change ‘as it is represented in the Google Ngram data’. On a more general level, the analysis demonstrates the importance of metadata, the availability of which is not just a nice add-on, but a powerful source of information for the digital humanities.
Recently, a claim was made, on the basis of the German Google Books 1-gram corpus (Michel et al., Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science 2010; 331: 176–82), that there was a linear relationship between six non-technical non-Nazi words and three ‘explicitly Nazi words’ in times of World War II (Caruana-Galizia. 2015. Politics and the German language: Testing Orwell’s hypothesis using the Google N-Gram corpus. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities [Online]. http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqv011 (accessed 15 April 2015)). Here, I try to show that apparent relationships like this are the result of misspecified models that do not take into account the temporal aspect of time-series data. The main point of this article is to demonstrate why such analyses run the risk of incorrect statistical inference, where potential effects are both meaningless and can potentially lead to wrong conclusions.