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We present an approach to an aspect of managing complex access scenarios to large and heterogeneous corpora that involves handling user queries that, intentionally or due to the complexity of the queried resource, target texts or annotations outside of the given user’s permissions. We first outline the overall architecture of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, devoting some attention to the way in which it handles multiple query languages, by implementing ISO CQLF (Corpus Query Lingua Franca), which in turn constitutes a component crucial for the functionality discussed here. Next, we look at query rewriting as it is used by KorAP and zoom in on one kind of this procedure, namely the rewriting of queries that is forced by data access restrictions.
The goal of the MULI (MUltiLingual Information structure) project is to empirically analyse information structure in German and English newspaper texts. In contrast to other projects in which information structure is annotated and investigated (e.g. in the Prague Dependency Treebank, which mirrors the basic information about the topic-focus articulation of the sentence), we do not annotate theory-biased categories like topic-focus or theme-rheme. Trying to be as theory-independent as possible, we annotate those features which are relevant to information structure and on the basis of which typical patterns, co-occurrences or correlations can be determined. We distinguish between three annotation levels: syntax, discourse and prosody. The data is based on the TIGER Corpus for German and the Penn Treebank for English, since the existing information on part-of-speech and syntactic structure can be re-used for our purposes. The actual annotation of an English example sequence illustrates our choice of categories on each level. Their combination offers the possibility to investigate how information structure is realised and can be interpreted.
The present article describes the first stage of the KorAP project, launched recently at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The aim of this project is to develop an innovative corpus analysis platform to tackle the increasing demands of modern linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse primary data and annotations in the petabyte range, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary linguistic data, and thus fully satisfying the demands of a scientific tool. An additional important aim of the project is to make corpus data as openly accessible as possible in light of unavoidable legal restrictions, for instance through support for distributed virtual corpora, user-defined annotations and adaptable user interfaces, as well as interfaces and sandboxes for user-supplied analysis applications. We discuss our motivation for undertaking this endeavour and the challenges that face it. Next, we outline our software implementation plan and describe development to-date.
The present paper describes Corpus Query Lingua Franca (ISO CQLF), a specification designed at ISO Technical Committee 37 Subcommittee 4 “Language resource management” for the purpose of facilitating the comparison of properties of corpus query languages. We overview the motivation for this endeavour and present its aims and its general architecture. CQLF is intended as a multi-part specification; here, we concentrate on the basic metamodel that provides a frame that the other parts fit in.
The research project “German Today” aims to determine the amount of regional variation in (near-)standard German spoken by young and older educated adults and to identify and locate regional features. To this end, we compile an areally extensive corpus of read and spontaneous German speech. Secondary school students and 50-to-60-year-old locals are recorded in 160 cities throughout the German speaking area of Europe. All participants read a number of short texts and a word list, name pictures, translate words and sentences from English, answer questions in a sociobiographic interview, and take part in a map task experiment. The resulting corpus comprises over 1000 hours of speech, which is transcribed orthographically. Automatically derived broad phonetic transcriptions, selective manual narrow phonetic transcriptions, and variationalist annotations are added. Focussing on phonetic variation we aim to show to what extent national or regional standards exist in spoken German. Furthermore, the linguistic variation due to different contextual styles (read vs. spontaneous speech) shall be analysed. Finally, the corpus enables us to investigate whether linguistic change has occurred in spoken (near-)standard German.
This paper introduces the recently started DRuKoLA-project that aims at providing mechanisms to flexibly draw virtual comparable corpora from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language CoRoLa in order to use these virtual corpora as empirical basis for contrastive linguistic research.
Data Mining with Shallow vs. Linguistic Features to Study Diversification of Scientific Registers
(2014)
We present a methodology to analyze the linguistic evolution of scientific registers with data mining techniques, comparing the insights gained from shallow vs. linguistic features. The focus is on selected scientific disciplines at the boundaries to computer science (computational linguistics, bioinformatics, digital construction, microelectronics). The data basis is the English Scientific Text Corpus (SCITEX) which covers a time range of roughly thirty years (1970/80s to early 2000s) (Degaetano-Ortlieb et al., 2013; Teich and Fankhauser, 2010). In particular, we investigate the diversification of scientific registers over time. Our theoretical basis is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its specific incarnation of register theory (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). In terms of methods, we combine corpus-based methods of feature extraction and data mining techniques.
This paper presents an algorithm and an implementation for efficient tokenization of texts of space-delimited languages based on a deterministic finite state automaton. Two representations of the underlying data structure are presented and a model implementation for German is compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The presented solution is faster than other tools while maintaining comparable quality.
KorAP is a corpus search and analysis platform, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). It supports very large corpora with multiple annotation layers, multiple query languages, and complex licensing scenarios. KorAP’s design aims to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable to serve the German Reference Corpus DEREKO for at least the next decade. To meet these requirements, we have adopted a highly modular microservice-based architecture. This paper outlines our approach: An architecture consisting of small components that are easy to extend, replace, and maintain. The components include a search backend, a user and corpus license management system, and a web-based user frontend. We also describe a general corpus query protocol used by all microservices for internal communications. KorAP is open source, licensed under BSD-2, and available on GitHub.
This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts.
Language resources are often compiled for the purpose of variational analysis, such as studying differences between genres, registers, and disciplines, regional and diachronic variation, influence of gender, cultural context, etc. Often the sheer number of potentially interesting contrastive pairs can get overwhelming due to the combinatorial explosion of possible combinations. In this paper, we present an approach that combines well understood techniques for visualization heatmaps and word clouds with intuitive paradigms for exploration drill down and side by side comparison to facilitate the analysis of language variation in such highly combinatorial situations. Heatmaps assist in analyzing the overall pattern of variation in a corpus, and word clouds allow for inspecting variation at the level of words.
We present the use of count-based and predictive language models for exploring language use in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. For collocation analysis along the syntagmatic axis we employ traditional association measures based on co-occurrence counts as well as predictive association measures derived from the output weights of skipgram word embeddings. For inspecting the semantic neighbourhood of words along the paradigmatic axis we visualize the high dimensional word embeddings in two dimensions using t-stochastic neighbourhood embeddings. Together, these visualizations provide a complementary, explorative approach to analysing very large corpora in addition to corpus querying. Moreover, we discuss count-based and predictive models w.r.t. scalability and maintainability in very large corpora.
This document presents ongoing work related to spoken language data within a project that aims to establish a common and unified infrastructure for the sustainable provision of linguistic primary research data at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS). In furtherance of its mission to “document the German language as it is currently used”, the project expects to enable the research community to access a broad empirical base of working material via a single platform. While the goal is to eventually cover all linguistically relevant digital resources of the IDS, including lexicographic information systems such as the IDS German Vocabulary Portal, OWID, written language corpora such as the IDS German Reference Corpus, DeReKo, and spoken language corpora such as the IDS German Speech Corpus for Research and Teaching, FOLK, the work presented here predominantly focuses on the latter type of data, i.e. speech corpora. Within this context, the present document pictures the project’s contributions to the development of standards and best practice guidelines concerning data storage, process documentation and legal issues for the sustainable preservation and long-term accessibility of primary linguistic research data.
In this paper, we address two problems in indexing and querying spoken language corpora with overlapping speaker contributions. First, we look into how token distance and token precedence can be measured when multiple primary data streams are available and when transcriptions happen to be tokenized, but are not synchronized with the sound at the level of individual tokens. We propose and experiment with a speaker based search mode that enables any speaker’s transcription tier to be the basic tokenization layer whereby the contributions of other speakers are mapped to this given tier. Secondly, we address two distinct methods of how speaker overlaps can be captured in the TEI based ISO Standard for Spoken Language Transcriptions (ISO 24624:2016) and how they can be queried by MTAS – an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying text with multilevel annotations. We illustrate the problems, introduce possible solutions and discuss their benefits and drawbacks.
The metadata management system for speech corpora “memasysco” has been developed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) and is applied for the first time to document the speech corpus “German Today”. memasysco is based on a data model for the documentation of speech corpora and contains two generic XML schemas that drive data capture, XML native database storage, dynamic publishing, and information retrieval. The development of memasysco’s information architecture was mainly based on the ISLE MetaData Initiative (IMDI) guidelines for publishing metadata of linguistic resources. However, since we also have to support the corpus management process in research projects at the IDS, we need a finer atomic granularity for some documentation components as well as more restrictive categories to ensure data integrity. The XML metadata of different speech corpus projects are centrally validated and natively stored in an Oracle XML database. The extension of the system to the management of annotations of audio and video signals (e.g. orthographic and phonetic transcriptions) is planned for the near future.
The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, an approach is presented how to select the correct antecedent for an anaphoric element according to the kind of text segments in which both of them occur. Basically, information on logical text structure (e.g. chapters, sections, paragraphs) is used in order to select the antecedent life span of a linguistic expression, i.e. some linguistic expressions are more likely to be chosen as an antecedent throughout the whole text than others. In addition, an appropriate search scope for an anaphora expressed by an expression can be defined according to the document structuring elements that include the linguistic expression. Corpus investigations give rise to the supposition that logical text structure influences the search scope of candidates for antecedents. Second, a solution is presented how to integrate the resources used for anaphora resolution. In this approach, multi-layered XML annotation is used in order to make a set of resources accessible for the anaphora resolution system.
Hosting Providers play an essential role in the development of Internet services such as e-Research Infrastructures. In order to promote the development of such services, legislators on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean introduced “safe harbour” provisions to protect Service Providers (a category which includes Hosting Providers) from legal claims (e.g. of copyright infringement). Relevant provisions can be found in § 512 of the United States Copyright Act and in art. 14 of the Directive 2000/31/EC (and its national implementations). The cornerstone of this framework is the passive role of the Hosting Provider through which he has no knowledge of the content that he hosts. With the arrival of Web 2.0, however, the role of Hosting Providers on the Internet changed; this change has been reflected in court decisions that have reached varying conclusions in the last few years. The purpose of this article is to present the existing framework (including recent case law from the US, Germany and France).
In order to develop its full potential, global communication needs linguistic support systems such as Machine Translation (MT). In the past decade, free online MT tools have become available to the general public, and the quality of their output is increasing. However, the use of such tools may entail various legal implications, especially as far as processing of personal data is concerned. This is even more evident if we take into account that their business model is largely based on providing translation in exchange for data, which can subsequently be used to improve the translation model, but also for commercial purposes. The purpose of this paper is to examine how free online MT tools fit in the European data protection framework, harmonised by the EU Data Protection Directive. The perspectives of both the user and the MT service provider are taken into account.
The debate on the use of personal data in language resources usually focuses — and rightfully so — on anonymisation. However, this very same debate usually ends quickly with the conclusion that proper anonymisation would necessarily cause loss of linguistically valuable information. This paper discusses an alternative approach — pseudonymisation. While pseudonymisation does not solve all the problems (inasmuch as pseudonymised data are still to be regarded as personal data and therefore their processing should still comply with the GDPR principles), it does provide a significant relief, especially — but not only — for those who process personal data for research purposes. This paper describes pseudonymisation as a measure to safeguard rights and interests of data subjects under the GDPR (with a special focus on the right to be informed). It also provides a concrete example of pseudonymisation carried out within a research project at the Institute of Information Technology and Communications of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
Researchers in Natural Language Processing rely on availability of data and software, ideally under open licenses, but little is done to actively encourage it. In fact, the current Copyright framework grants exclusive rights to authors to copy their works, make them available to the public and make derivative works (such as annotated language corpora). Moreover, in the EU databases are protected against unauthorized extraction and re-utilization of their contents. Therefore, proper public licensing plays a crucial role in providing access to research data. A public license is a license that grants certain rights not to one particular user, but to the general public (everybody). Our article presents a tool that we developed and whose purpose is to assist the user in the licensing process. As software and data should be licensed under different licenses, the tool is composed of two separate parts: Data and Software. The underlying logic as well as elements of the graphic interface are presented below.
Ethical issues in Language Resources and Language Technology are often invoked, but rarely discussed. This is at least partly because little work has been done to systematize ethical issues and principles applicable in the fields of Language Resources and Language Technology. This paper provides an overview of ethical issues that arise at different stages of Language Resources and Language Technology development, from the conception phase through the construction phase to the use phase. Based on this overview, the authors propose a tentative taxonomy of ethical issues in Language Resources and Language Technology, built around five principles: Privacy, Property, Equality, Transparency and Freedom. The authors hope that this tentative taxonomy will facilitate ethical assessment of projects in the field of Language Resources and Language Technology, and structure the discussion on ethical issues in this domain, which may eventually lead to the adoption of a universally accepted Code of Ethics of the Language Resources and Language Technology community.
This paper gives an overview of recent developments in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo in terms of growth, maximising relevant corpus strata, metadata, legal issues, and its current and future research interface. Due to the recent acquisition of new licenses, DeReKo has grown by a factor of four in the first half of 2014, mostly in the area of newspaper text, and presently contains over 24 billion word tokens. Other strata, like fictional texts, web corpora, in particular CMC texts, and spoken but conceptually written texts have also increased significantly. We report on the newly acquired corpora that led to the major increase, on the principles and strategies behind our corpus acquisition activities, and on our solutions for the emerging legal, organisational, and technical challenges.
This paper describes the efforts in the field of sustainability of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim with respect to DEREKO (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German. With focus on re-usability and sustainability, we discuss its history and our future plans. We describe legal challenges related to the creation of a large and sustainable resource; sketch out the pipeline used to convert raw texts to the final corpus format and outline migration plans to TEI P5. Due to the fact, that the current version of the corpus management and query system is pushed towards its limits, we discuss the requirements for a new version which will be able to handle current and future DEREKO releases. Furthermore, we outline the institute’s plans in the field of digital preservation.
The QUEST (QUality ESTablished) project aims at ensuring the reusability of audio-visual datasets (Wamprechtshammer et al., 2022) by devising quality criteria and curating processes. RefCo (Reference Corpora) is an initiative within QUEST in collaboration with DoReCo (Documentation Reference Corpus, Paschen et al. (2020)) focusing on language documentation projects. Previously, Aznar and Seifart (2020) introduced a set of quality criteria dedicated to documenting fieldwork corpora. Based on these criteria, we establish a semi-automatic review process for existing and work-in-progress corpora, in particular for language documentation. The goal is to improve the quality of a corpus by increasing its reusability. A central part of this process is a template for machine-readable corpus documentation and automatic data verification based on this documentation. In addition to the documentation and automatic verification, the process involves a human review and potentially results in a RefCo certification of the corpus. For each of these steps, we provide guidelines and manuals. We describe the evaluation process in detail, highlight the current limits for automatic evaluation and how the manual review is organized accordingly.
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.
The representation of semantic relations between word senses of different entries in a dictionary is subject to a number of consistency requirements. This paper discusses the issue of maintaining and accessing consistent information on cross-references between sense-related items in electronic dictionaries from a mainly text-technological point of view. We present a number of consistency criteria for cross-referencing related senses and propose a practical approach to handling sense relations in an online dictionary. Our proposal is currently being tested in a large ongoing online dictionary project for German called elexiko. We focus on three different aspects of the dictionary development and editing process where consistency is an important issue: lexicographic data modelling, implementation of a lexicographic database system for an electronic dictionary, and development of practical tools for the lexicographer’s workbench.
In this paper we investigate the coverage of the two knowledge sources WordNet and Wikipedia for the task of bridging resolution. We report on an annotation experiment which yielded pairs of bridging anaphors and their antecedents in spoken multi-party dialog. Manual inspection of the two knowledge sources showed that, with some interesting exceptions, Wikipedia is superior to WordNet when it comes to the coverage of information necessary to resolve the bridging anaphors in our data set. We further describe a simple procedure for the automatic extraction of the required knowledge from Wikipedia by means of an API, and discuss some of the implications of the procedure’s performance.
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.
Newspapers became extremely popular in Germany during the 18th and 19th century, and thus increasingly influential for modern German. However, due to the lack of digitized historical newspaper corpora for German, this influence could not be analyzed systematically. In this paper, we introduce the Mannheim Corpus of Digital Newspapers and Magazines, which in its current release comprises 21 newspapers and magazines from the 18th and 19th century. With over 4.1 Mio tokens in about 650 volumes it currently constitutes the largest historical corpus dedicated to newspapers in German. We briefly discuss the prospect of the corpus for analyzing the evolution of news as a genre in its own right and the influence of contextual parameters such as region and register on the language of news. We then focus on one historically influential aspect of newspapers – their role in disseminating foreign words in German. Our preliminary quantitative results indeed indicate that newspapers use foreign words significantly more frequently than other genres, in particular belles lettres.
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.
This paper presents a compositional annotation scheme to capture the clusivity properties of personal pronouns in context, that is their ability to construct and manage in-groups and out-groups by including/excluding the audience and/or non-speech act participants in reference to groups that also include the speaker. We apply and test our schema on pronoun instances in speeches taken from the German parliament. The speeches cover a time period from 2017-2021 and comprise manual annotations for 3,126 sentences. We achieve high inter-annotator agreement for our new schema, with a Cohen’s κ in the range of 89.7-93.2 and a percentage agreement of > 96%. Our exploratory analysis of in/exclusive pronoun use in the parliamentary setting provides some face validity for our new schema. Finally, we present baseline experiments for automatically predicting clusivity in political debates, with promising results for many referential constellations, yielding an overall 84.9% micro F1 for all pronouns.
The Meta-data-Database of a Next Generation Sustainability Web-Platform for Language Resources
(2008)
Our goal is to provide a web-based platform for the long-term preservation and distribution of a heterogeneous collection of linguistic resources. We discuss the corpus preprocessing and normalisation phase that results in sets of multi-rooted trees. At the same time we transform the original metadata records, just like the corpora annotated using different annotation approaches and exhibiting different levels of granularity, into the all-encompassing and highly flexible format eTEI for which we present editing and parsing tools. We also discuss the architecture of the sustainability platform. Its primary components are an XML database that contains corpus and metadata files and an SQL database that contains user accounts and access control lists. A staging area, whose structure, contents, and consistency can be checked using tools, is used to make sure that new resources about to be imported into the platform have the correct structure.
Sentiment analysis has so far focused on the detection of explicit opinions. However, of late implicit opinions have received broader attention, the key idea being that the evaluation of an event type by a speaker depends on how the participants in the event are valued and how the event itself affects the participants. We present an annotation scheme for adding relevant information, couched in terms of so-called effect functors, to German lexical items. Our scheme synthesizes and extends previous proposals. We report on an inter-annotator agreement study. We also present results of a crowdsourcing experiment to test the utility of some known and some new functors for opinion inference where, unlike in previous work, subjects are asked to reason from event evaluation to participant evaluation.
This paper presents an annotation scheme for English modal verbs together with sense-annotated data from the news domain. We describe our annotation scheme and discuss problematic cases for modality annotation based on the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic sense tagging, showing that our annotations do provide a valuable training resource for NLP systems.
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 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.
"FOLK is the ""Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK)"" (eng.: research and teaching corpus of spoken German). The project has set itself the aim of building a corpus of German conversations which a) covers a broad range of interaction types in private, institutional and public settings, b) is sufficiently large and diverse and of sufficient quality to support different qualitative and quantitative research approaches, c) is transcribed, annotated and made accessible according to current technological standards, and d) is available to the scientific community on a sound legal basis and without unnecessary restrictions of usage. This paper gives an overview of the corpus design, the strategies for acquisition of a diverse range of interaction data, and the corpus construction workflow from recording via transcription an annotation to dissemination."
The Database for Spoken German (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD2, http://dgd.ids-mannheim.de) is the central platform for publishing and disseminating spoken language corpora from the Archive of Spoken German (Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch, AGD, http://agd.ids-mannheim.de) at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. The corpora contained in the DGD2 come from a variety of sources, some of them in-house projects, some of them external projects. Most of the corpora were originally intended either for research into the (dialectal) variation of German or for studies in conversation analysis and related fields. The AGD has taken over the task of permanently archiving these resources and making them available for reuse to the research community. To date, the DGD2 offers access to 19 different corpora, totalling around 9000 speech events, 2500 hours of audio recordings or 8 million transcribed words. This paper gives an overview of the data made available via the DGD2, of the technical basis for its implementation, and of the most important functionalities it offers. The paper concludes with information about the users of the database and future plans for its development.
This paper presents FOLKER, an annotation tool developed for the efficient transcription of natural, multi-party interaction in a conversation analysis framework. FOLKER is being developed at the Institute for German Language in and for the FOLK project, whose aim is the construction of a large corpus of spoken present-day German, to be used for research and teaching purposes. FOLKER builds on the experience gained with multi-purpose annotation tools like ELAN and EXMARaLDA, but attempts to improve transcription efficiency by restricting and optimizing both data model and tool functionality to a single, well-defined purpose. This paper starts with a description of the GAT transcription conventions and the data model underlying the tool. It then gives an overview of the tool functionality and compares this functionality to that of other widely used tools.
We present a novel NLP resource for the explanation of linguistic phenomena, built and evaluated exploring very large annotated language corpora. For the compilation, we use the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) with more than 5 billion word forms, which is the largest linguistic resource worldwide for the study of contemporary written German. The result is a comprehensive database of German genitive formations, enriched with a broad range of intra- und extralinguistic metadata. It can be used for the notoriously controversial classification and prediction of genitive endings (short endings, long endings, zero-marker). We also evaluate the main factors influencing the use of specific endings. To get a general idea about a factor’s influences and its side effects, we calculate chi-square-tests and visualize the residuals with an association plot. The results are evaluated against a gold standard by implementing tree-based machine learning algorithms. For the statistical analysis, we applied the supervised LMT Logistic Model Trees algorithm, using the WEKA software. We intend to use this gold standard to evaluate GenitivDB, as well as to explore methodologies for a predictive genitive model.
Linguistic query systems are special purpose IR applications. As text sizes, annotation layers, and metadata schemes of language corpora grow rapidly, performing complex searches becomes a highly computational expensive task. We evaluate several storage models and indexing variants in two multi-processor/multi-core environments, focusing on prototypical linguistic querying scenarios. Our aim is to reveal modeling and querying tendencies – rather than absolute benchmark results – when using a relational database management system (RDBMS) and MapReduce for natural language corpus retrieval. Based on these findings, we are going to improve our approach for the efficient exploitation of very large corpora, combining advantages of state-of-the-art database systems with decomposition/parallelization strategies. Our reference implementation uses the German DeReKo reference corpus with currently more than 4 billion word forms, various multi-layer linguistic annotations, and several types of text-specific metadata. The proposed strategy is language-independent and adaptable to large-scale multilingual corpora.
The CELEX database is one of the standard lexical resources for German. It yields a wealth of data especially for phonological and morphological applications. The morphological part comprises deep-structure morphological analyses of German. However, as it was developed in the Nineties, both encoding and spelling are outdated. About one fifth of over 50,000 datasets contain umlauts and signs such as ß. Changes to a modern version cannot be obtained by simple substitution. In this paper, we shortly describe the original content and form of the orthographic and morphological database for German in CELEX. Then we present our work on modernizing the linguistic data. Lemmas and morphological analyses are transferred to a modern standard of encoding by first merging orthographic and morphological information of the lemmas and their entries and then performing a second substitution for the morphs within their morphological analyses. Changes to modern German spelling are performed by substitution rules according to orthographical standards. We show an example of the use of the data for the disambiguation of morphological structures. The discussion describes prospects of future work on this or similar lexicons. The Perl script is publicly available on our website.
Research today is often performed in collaborated projects composed of project partners with different backgrounds and from different institutions and countries. Standards can be a crucial tool to help harmonizing these differences and to create sustainable resources. However, choosing a standard depends on having enough information to evaluate and compare different annotation and metadata formats. In this paper we present ongoing work on an interactive, collaborative website that collects information on standards in the field of linguistics as a means to guide interested researchers.
The authors describe two data sets submitted to the database of MWE evaluation resources: (1) cranberry expressions in English and (2) cranberry expressions in German. The first package contains a collection of 444 cranberry words in German (CWde.txt) and a collection of the corresponding cranberry expressions (CCde.txt). The second package consists of a collection of 77 cranberry words in English (CWen.txt) and a collection of the corresponding cranberry expressions (CCen.txt). The data included in these packages was extracted from the Collection of Distributionally Idiosyncratic Items (CoDII), an electronic linguistic resource of lexical items with idiosyncratic occurrence patterns. Each package contains a readme file, and can be downloaded from multiword.wiki.sourceforge.net/Resources.
Measuring the quality of metadata is only possible by assessing the quality of the underlying schema and the metadata instance. We propose some factors that are measurable automatically for metadata according to the CMD framework, taking into account the variability of schemas that can be defined in this framework. The factors include among others the number of elements, the (re-)use of reusable components, the number of filled in elements. The resulting score can serve as an indicator of the overall quality of the CMD instance, used for feedback to metadata providers or to provide an overview of the overall quality of metadata within a repository. The score is independent of specific schemas and generalizable. An overall assessment of harvested metadata is provided in form of statistical summaries and the distribution, based on a corpus of harvested metadata. The score is implemented in XQuery and can be used in tools, editors and repositories.
Lexicon schemas and their use are discussed in this paper from the perspective of lexicographers and field linguists. A variety of lexicon schemas have been developed, with goals ranging from computational lexicography (DATR) through archiving (LIFT, TEI) to standardization (LMF, FSR). A number of requirements for lexicon schemas are given. The lexicon schemas are introduced and compared to each other in terms of conversion and usability for this particular user group, using a common lexicon entry and providing examples for each schema under consideration. The formats are assessed and the final recommendation is given for the potential users, namely to request standard compliance from the developers of the tools used. This paper should foster a discussion between authors of standards, lexicographers and field linguists.
The transfer of research data management from one institution to another infrastructural partner is all but trivial, but can be required,for instance, when an institution faces reorganisation or closure. In a case study, we describe the migration of all research data, identify the challenges we encountered, and discuss how we addressed them. It shows that the moving of research data management to another institution is a feasible, but potentially costly enterprise. Being able to demonstrate the feasibility of research data migration supports the stance of data archives that users can expect high levels of trust and reliability when it comes to data safety and sustainability.
The Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI) is the dominant framework for describing language resources according to ISO 24622 (ISO/TC 37/SC 4, 2015). Within the CLARIN world, CMDI has become a huge success. The Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) now holds over 800.000 resources, all described with CMDI-based metadata. With the metadata being harvested from about thirty centres, there is a considerable amount of heterogeneity in the data. In part, there is some use of controlled vocabularies to keep data heterogeneity in check, say when describing the type of a resource, or the country the resource is originating from. However, when CMDI data refers to the names of persons or organisations, strings are used in a rather uncontrolled manner. Here, the CMDI community can learn from libraries and archives who maintain standardised lists for all kinds of names. In this paper, we advocate the use of freely available authority files that support the unique identification of persons, organisations, and more. The systematic use of authority records enhances the quality of the metadata, hence improves the faceted browsing experience in the VLO, and also prepares the sharing of CMDI-based metadata with the data in library catalogues.
In this paper, we present a GOLD standard of part-of-speech tagged transcripts of spoken German. The GOLD standard data consists of four annotation layers – transcription (modified orthography), normalization (standard orthography), lemmatization and POS tags – all of which have undergone careful manual quality control. It comes with guidelines for the manual POS annotation of transcripts of German spoken data and an extended version of the STTS (Stuttgart Tübingen Tagset) which accounts for phenomena typically found in spontaneous spoken German. The GOLD standard was developed on the basis of the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German, FOLK, and is, to our knowledge, the first such dataset based on a wide variety of spontaneous and authentic interaction types. It can be used as a basis for further development of language technology and corpus linguistic applications for German spoken language.
We describe a general two-stage procedure for re-using a custom corpus for spoken language system development involving a transformation from character-based markup to XML, and DSSSL stylesheet-driven XML markup enhancement with multiple lexical tag trees. The procedure was used to generate a fully tagged corpus; alternatively with greater economy of computing resources, it can be employed as a parametrised ‘tagging on demand’ filter. The implementation will shortly be released as a public resource together with the corpus (German spoken dialogue, about 500k word form tokens) and lexicon (about 75k word form types).
The Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI) is a framework for the creation and usage of metadata formats to describe all kinds of resources in the CLARIN world. To better connect to the library world, and to allow librarians to enter metadata for linguistic resources into their catalogues, a crosswalk from CMDI-based formats to bibliographic standards is required. The general and rather fluid nature of CMDI, however, makes it hard to map arbitrary CMDI schemas to metadata standards such as Dublin Core (DC) or MARC 21, which have a mature, well-defined and fixed set of field descriptors. In this paper, we address the issue and propose crosswalks between CMDI-based profiles originating from the NaLiDa project and DC and MARC 21, respectively.
In order to satisfy the information needs of a wide range of researchers across a number of disciplines, large textual datasets require careful design, collection, cleaning, encoding, annotation, storage, retrieval, and curation. This daunting set of tasks has coalesced into a number of key themes and questions that are of interest to the contributing research communities: (a) what sampling techniques can we apply? (b) what quality issues should we be aware of? (c) what infrastructures and frameworks are being developed for the efficient storage, annotation, analysis and retrieval of large datasets? (d) what affordances do visualisation techniques offer for the exploratory analysis approaches of corpora? (e) what legal paths can be followed in dealing with IPR and data protection issues governing both the data sources and the query results? (f) how to guarantee that corpus data remain available and usable in a sustainable way?
Contents:
1. Vasile Pais, Maria Mitrofan, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Elena Irimia, Roxana Micu and Carol Luca Gasan: Challenges in Creating a Representative Corpus of Romanian Micro-Blogging Text. Pp. 1-7
2. Modest von Korff: Exhaustive Indexing of PubMed Records with Medical Subject Headings. Pp. 8-15
3. Luca Brigada Villa: UDeasy: a Tool for Querying Treebanks in CoNLL-U Format. Pp. 16-19
4. Nils Diewald: Matrix and Double-Array Representations for Efficient Finite State Tokenization. Pp. 20-26
5. Peter Fankhauser and Marc Kupietz: Count-Based and Predictive Language Models for Exploring DeReKo. Pp. 27-31
6. Hanno Biber: “The word expired when that world awoke.” New Challenges for Research with Large Text Corpora and Corpus-Based Discourse Studies in Totalitarian Times. Pp. 32-35