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Das Phänomen Sprache ist in Form des beobachtbaren Sprachgebrauchs fast allgegenwärtig, gleichzeitig bleibt das offenkundig Regel- und Systemhafte dieses Phänomens überraschend ungreifbar. Wegen der überwältigenden Komplexität natürlicher Sprachen entsteht bei jedem Versuch, dieses Systemhafte in einer Theorie mit explanatorischem Anspruch zu fassen, eine breite Kluft zwischen der angestrebten theoretischen Beschreibungsebene einerseits und der phänomenologisch zugänglichen Ebene des Sprachgebrauchs andererseits.
Ausgehend von allgemeinen wissenschaftstheoretischen Überlegungen, wie man angesichts dieser Kluft überhaupt zu hinreichend abgesicherten Erkenntnissen für eine explanatorische Theoriebildung kommen kann, betonen die Autoren die Notwendigkeit, sich dem Untersuchungsgegenstand Sprache mit möglichst wenigen Vorannahmen über diesen Gegenstand selbst zu nähern und sich dabei konsequent von der Empirie leiten zu lassen. Sie werben nachdrücklich für eine emergentistische Perspektive auf Sprache, der zufolge alles Regelhafte und Konventionelle in der Sprache ein Epiphänomen des Sprachgebrauchs ist und von den Sprachteilnehmern fortlaufend ausgehandelt wird. Eine treibende Kraft hierbei ist, so wird argumentiert, der Begriff der Ähnlichkeit. Auf dieser Grundlage wird schließlich ein Forschungsprogramm entworfen, das die Wirkung des Faktors Ähnlichkeit auf die Sprache nachzuzeichnen und dadurch schrittweise zu ähnlichen Generalisierungen zu gelangen versucht wie die Sprachgemeinschaft.
The paper discusses from various angles the morphosyntactic annotation of DeReKo, the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part covers the practical and technical aspects of this endeavor. We present results from a recent evaluation of tools for the annotation of German text resources that have been applied to DeReKo. These tools include commercial products, especially Xerox' Finite State Tools and the Machinese products developed by the Finnish company Connexor Oy, as well as software for which academic licenses are available free of charge for academic institutions, e.g. Helmut Schmid's Tree Tagger. The second part focuses on the linguistic interpretability of the corpus annotations and more general methodological considerations concerning scientifically sound empirical linguistic research. The main challenge here is that unlike the texts themselves, the morphosyntactic annotations of DeReKo do not have the status of observed data; instead they constitute a theory and implementation-dependent interpretation. In addition, because of the enormous size of DeReKo, a systematic manual verification of the automatic annotations is not feasible. In consequence, the expected degree of inaccuracy is very high, particularly wherever linguistically challenging phenomena, such as lexical or grammatical variation, are concerned. Given these facts, a researcher using the annotations blindly will run the risk of not actually studying the language but rather the annotation tool or the theory behind it. The paper gives an overview of possible pitfalls and ways to circumvent them and discusses the opportunities offered by using annotations in corpus-based and corpus-driven grammatical research against the background of a scientifically sound methodology.
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.
Empirical synchronic language studies generally seek to investigate language phenomena for one point in time, even though this point in time is often not stated explicitly. Until today, surprisingly little research has addressed the implications of this time-dependency of synchronic research on the composition and analysis of data that are suitable for conducting such studies. Existing solutions and practices tend to be too general to meet the needs of all kinds of research questions. In this theoretical paper that is targeted at both corpus creators and corpus users, we propose to take a decidedly synchronic perspective on the relevant language data. Such a perspective may be realised either in terms of sampling criteria or in terms of analytical methods applied to the data. As a general approach for both realisations, we introduce and explore the FReD strategy (Frequency Relevance Decay) which models the relevance of language events from a synchronic perspective. This general strategy represents a whole family of synchronic perspectives that may be customised to meet the requirements imposed by the specific research questions and language domain under investigation.
Taking a usage-based perspective, lexical-semantic relations and other aspects of lexical meaning are characterised as emerging from language use. At the same time, they shape language use and therefore become manifest in corpus data. This paper discusses how this mutual influence can be taken into account in the study of these relations. An empirically driven methodology is proposed that is, as an initial step, based on self-organising clustering of comprehensive collocation profiles. Several examples demonstrate how this methodology may guide linguists in explicating implicit knowledge of complex semantic structures. Although these example analyses are conducted for written German, the overall methodology is language-independent.
^This paper describes DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, and the rationale behind its development. We discuss its design, its legal background, how to access it, available metadata, linguistic annotation layers, underlying standards, ongoing developments, and aspects of using the archive for empirical linguistic research. The focus of the paper is on the advantages of DEREKO’s design as a primordial sample from which virtual corpora can be drawn for the specific purposes of individual studies. Both concepts, primordial sample and virtual corpus are explained and illustrated in detail. Furthermore, we describe in more detail how DEREKO deals with the fact that all its texts are subject to third parties’ intellectual property rights, and how it deals with the issue of replicability, which is particularly challenging given DEREKO’s dynamic growth and the possibility to construct from it an open number of virtual corpora.
This paper presents ongoing research which is embedded in an empirical-linguistic research program, set out to devise viable research strategies for developing an explanatory theory of grammar as a psychological and social phenomenon. As this phenomenon cannot be studied directly, the program attempts to approach it indirectly through its correlates in language corpora, which is justified by referring to the core tenets of Emergent Grammar. The guiding principle for identifying such corpus correlates of grammatical regularities is to imitate the psychological processes underlying the emergent nature of these regularities. While previous work in this program focused on syntagmatic structures, the current paper goes one step further by investigating schematic structures that involve paradigmatic variation. It introduces and explores a general strategy by which corpus correlates of such structures may be uncovered, and it further outlines how these correlates may be used to study the nature of the psychologically real schematic structures.
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.
Korpuslinguistik
(2012)
The KorAP project (“Korpusanalyseplattform der nächste Generation”, “Corpus-analysis platform of the next generation”), carried out at the Institut fUr Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, has as its goal the development of a modem, state-of-the-art corpus-analysis platform, capable of handling very large corpora and opening the perspectives for innovative linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse extremely large amounts of primary data and annotations, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary un-annotated text, and thus fully satisfying expectations associated with a scientific tool. The project started in July 2011 and is funded till June 2014. The demo presentation in December will be the first version following a preliminary feature freeze, and will open the alpha testing phase of the project.
Igel is a small XQuery-based web application for examining a collection of document grammars; in particular, for comparing related document grammars to get a better overview of their differences and similarities. In its initial form, Igel reads only DTDs and provides only simple lists of constructs in them (elements, attributes, notations, parameter entities). Our continuing work is aimed at making Igel provide more sophisticated and useful information about document grammars and building the application into a useful tool for the analysis (and the maintenance!) of families of related document grammars
Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie und inwieweit korpusbasierte Ansätze zur Untersuchung und Bewertung von Sprachwandel beitragen können. Die Bewertung von Sprachwandel erscheint in dieser Hinsicht interessant, da sie erstens von größerem öffentlichen Interesse ist, zweitens nicht zu den Kernthemen der Sprachwissenschaft zählt und drittens sowohl die geisteswissenschaftlichen Aspekte der Sprachwissenschaft berührt als auch die empirischen, die eher für die so genannten harten Wissenschaften typisch sind. Letzteres trifft bei der Frage nach Sprachverfall (gutem vs. schlechtem Deutsch diachron) vermutlich unbestrittener zu als bei der Frage nach richtigem vs. falschem Deutsch, da zu ihrer Beantwortung offensichtlich einerseits empirische, messbare Kriterien herangezogen werden müssen, andererseits aber auch weitere Kriterien notwendig sind und es außerdem einer Entscheidung zur Einordnung und Gewichtung der verschiedenartigen Kriterien sowie einer Begründung dieser Entscheidung bedarf. Zur Annäherung an die Fragestellung werden zunächst gängige, leicht operationalisierbare Hypothesen zu Symptomen eines potenziellen Verfalls des Deutschen auf verschiedenen DeReKo-basierten Korpora überprüft und im Hinblick auf ihre Verallgemeinerbarkeit und Tragweite diskutiert. Im zweiten Teil werden weitere empirische Ansätze zur Untersuchung von Wandel, Variation und Dynamik skizziert, die zur Diskussion spezieller Aspekte von Sprachverfall beitragen könnten. Im Schlussteil werden die vorgestellten Ansätze in den Gesamtkontext einer sprachwissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Sprachverfall gestellt und vor dem Hintergrund seines gesellschaftlichen Diskurses reflektiert.
This paper 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.
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.
Maximizing the potential of very large corpora: 50 years of big language data at IDS Mannheim
(2014)
Very large corpora have been built and used at the IDS since its foundation in 1964. They have been made available on the Internet since the beginning of the 90’s to currently over 30,000 researchers worldwide. The Institute provides the largest archive of written German (Deutsches Referenzkorpus, DeReKe) which has recently been extended to 24 billion words. DeReKe has been managed and analysed by engines known as COSMAS and afterwards COSMAS II, which is currently being replaced by a new, scalable analysis platform called KorAP. KorAP makes it possible to manage and analyse texts that are accompanied by multiple, potentially conflicting, grammatical and structural annotation layers, and is able to handle resources that are distributed across different, and possibly geographically distant, storage systems. The majority of texts in DeReKe are not licensed for free redistribution, hence, the COSMAS and KorAP systems offer technical solutions to facilitate research on very large corpora that are not available (and not suitable) for download. For the new KorAP system, it is also planned to provide sandboxed environments to support non-remote-API access “near the data” through which users can run their own analysis programs.