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Question Answering Systems for retrieving information from Knowledge Graphs (KG) have become a major area of interest in recent years. Current systems search for words and entities but cannot search for grammatical phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to present our research on developing a QA System that answers natural language questions about German grammar.
Our goal is to build a KG which contains facts and rules about German grammar, and is also able to answer specific questions about a concrete grammatical issue. An overview of the current research in the topic of QA systems and ontology design is given and we show how we plan to construct the KG by integrating the data in the grammatical information system Grammis, hosted by the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS). In this paper, we describe the construction of the initial KG, sketch our resulting graph, and demonstrate the effectiveness of such an approach. A grammar correction component will be part of a later stage. The paper concludes with the potential areas for future research.
Interview mit Ulrich Engel
(2017)
Das Handbuch Europäische Sprachkritik Online liefert eine vergleichende Perspektive auf Sprachkritik in europäischen Sprachkulturen (im Speziellen auf die Sprachkritik im Deutschen, Englischen, Französischen, Italienischen und Kroatischen). In dem Handbuch werden zentrale Konzepte der Sprachkritik deskriptiv behandelt. Das Ziel ist demnach, eine Konzeptgeschichte der europäischen Sprachkritik zu präsentieren. Zum einen liefert das Handbuch einen spezifischen Blick auf die jeweiligen Sprachkulturen. Zum anderen werden diese vergleichend in den Blick genommen. Das multilinguale Handbuch erscheint periodisch in Bänden.
Wolfgang von Kempelen's book "The Mechanism of Human Speech" from 1791 is a famous milestone in the history of speech communication research. It has an enormous relevance for the phonetic sciences and it marks an important turning point for the development of the (mechanical) speech synthesis. So far no English version of this work was available, which excludes many interested researchers. Access to the original versions in German and French is restricted for various reasons. For example the blackletter script of the German version is troublesome for most of today's readers. We report here on a new edition of Kempelen's book which unites a better readable German version and its English translation. It will now also be in a searchable electronic format and has been enriched with many commentaries, which aid in the understanding of details of the late 18th century that are little known or unknown to many researchers today.
There are a number of recent replicas of Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine. Although all of them are explicitly based on Kempelen's own description nearly none of them are identical in construction and sound. In this paper we want to illustrate some of these differences and their reasons for five replicas built by ourselves.
Das 18. Jahrhundert war wissenschaftlich von großen Umbrüchen geprägt, auch im Bereich der Anatomie und Physiologie des Menschen. Die hierauserwachsende lebhafte Diskussion erstreckte sich auch auf das noch sehr junge Gebiet der (mechanischen) Sprachsynthese und ihrer Grundlagen. Das Sprachsynthesekonzept Wolfgang von Kempelens (1734–1804) ist hierbei ein besonders eindrückliches Beispiel dafür, dass eine grundlegende wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis womöglich durch technologische Limitationen nicht notwendigerweise auch praktisch umgesetzt werden kann. Grundsätzlich waren Kempelens Erkenntnisse zur Anatomie und Physiologie des Menschen und damit auch zur Spracherzeugung weitestgehend zutreffend. Die praktische Umsetzung hingegen wirkt aus heutiger Sicht recht kurios. Kempelens Vokaltrakt-Konzept soll exemplarisch dem nur wenig früher entstandenen Prototypen zur Sprachsynthese Christian Gottlieb Kratzensteins (1723–1795) gegenübergestellt werden. Dessen „Erkenntnisse“ müssen heute vielfach als falsch bezeichnet werden; sein Modell zur Vokalsynthese weist einerseits auffällige Parallelen zu demjenigen KEMPELENS auf, geht hinsichtlich der Physiologie jedoch von vielfach irrigen Annahmen aus.
Nach Bemerkungen zur Abgrenzung des Gegenstandes und einem kurzen Forschungsbericht zur Entwicklung der gesprächsanalytischen Forschung zu Beratung und verwandten Flandlungssituationen wird die gesprächsanalytische Vorgehensweise an einem einfachen Fallbeispiel demonstriert (Kap. 2) mit dem Ziel, das Erkenntnispotential bei der Aufdeckung von Handlungsstrukturen im Gespräch und damit verknüpfter inhärenter Probleme der Gesprächsführung zu verdeutlichen. Vor dem Hintergrund der ersten Verlaufsanalyse werden dann Kernstrukturen des Beratens systematisch dargestellt, insbesondere das Handlungsschema Beraten und die strukturellen Vorgaben für die sequenzielle Durchführung (Kap. 3). Schließlich werden ausgewählte Strategien des Gesprächshandelns von Ratsuchenden und Ratgebern dargestellt, mit denen diese versuchen, ihre Perspektive zur Geltung zu bringen, und die mit den Zielsetzungen und dem Rollenverständnis der Akteure, ihrem Selbstverständnis als Handelnde und ihrem Umgang mit spezifischen inhärenten Problemen des Beratungshandeln Zusammenhängen (Kap. 4). Als Materialgrundlage wird ein gemischtes Korpus von Beratungsgesprächen aus privaten und unterschiedlichen institutioneilen Kontexten benutzt (u.a. Studienberatung, ärztliche Beratung, kommunale Mieterberatung).
Reformulating place
(2013)
This report examines what can be accomplished in conversation by reformulating a reference to a place using the practices of repair. It is based on an analysis of a collection of place references situated in second pair parts of adjacency pairs taken from a wide range of field recordings of talk-in-interaction. Not surprisingly, place references are sometimes reformulated so as to indicate a misspeaking or in pursuit of recipient recognition. At other times, however, we show that place references can be reformulated to more adequately implement the action of a turn in prosecuting the course of action of which it is a part. In these cases repairing a place reference can target a source of trouble associated with implementing the action of a turn at talk, and thus reformulating place can serve as a practical resource for accomplishing a range of interactional tasks. We conclude with a more complex case in which two reformulations are deployed in responding to a so-called ‘double-barrelled’ initiating action.
The paper reports on the results of a scientific colloquium dedicated to the creation of standards and best practices which are needed to facilitate the integration of language resources for CMC stemming from different origins and the linguistic analysis of CMC phenomena in different languages and genres. The key issue to be solved is that of interoperability – with respect to the structural representation of CMC genres, linguistic annotations metadata, and anonymization/pseudonymization schemas. The objective of the paper is to convince more projects to partake in a discussion about standards for CMC corpora and for the creation of a CMC corpus infrastructure across languages and genres. In view of the broad range of corpus projects which are currently underway all over Europe, there is a great window of opportunity for the creation of standards in a bottom-up approach.
As a consequence of a recent curation project, the Dortmund Chat Corpus is available in CLARIN-D research infrastructures for download and querying. In a legal expertise it had been recommended that standard measures of anonymisation be applied to the corpus before its republication. This paper reports about the anonymisation campaign that was conducted for the corpus. Anonymisation has been realised as categorisation, and the taxonomy of anonymisation categories applied is introduced and the method of applying it to the TEI files is demonstrated. The results of the anonymisation campaign as well as issues of quality assessment are discussed. Finally, pseudonymisation as an alternative to categorisation as a method of the anonymisation of CMC data is discussed, as well as possibilities of an automatisation of the process.
The paper presents best practices and results from projects dedicated to the creation of corpora of computer-mediated communication and social media interactions (CMC) from four different countries. Even though there are still many open issues related to building and annotating corpora of this type, there already exists a range of tested solutions which may serve as a starting point for a comprehensive discussion on how future standards for CMC corpora could (and should) be shaped like.
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.
Prosodic constructions used to compete for the speaking turn in conversation have been widely studied (French & Local (1983), Kurtić et al. (2013)). Usually, turn competition arises in overlapping talk between at least two speakers. Coordination between participants in their prosodic design of talk (Szczepek-Reed, 2006) and social action (Gorisch et al. 2012), as well as entrainment in more general terms (Levitan et al. 2011), is well established in the literature. Nevertheless, previous studies on turn competition and overlap do not investigate the prosodic design of turn competitive incomings in reference to the orientation of the speakers to each other. Rather, they assume that prosodic constructions are used for turn competition regardless of the co-participants’ design of the turn. In this paper, we ask whether the prosodic design of turn competitive talk is co-constructed between two participants talking in overlap. More specifically, we investigate whether the prosodic design of one participant’s in overlap talk is developed with respect to the interlocutor’s prosodic features during the same portion of overlapped talk, and whether this prosodic matching can discriminate between the overlaps that are competitive and those that are not. 183 Our analyses are based on two-speaker overlaps drawn from a corpus of multi-party face-to face conversation between four friends recorded in British English (Kurtic et al. 2012). 3407 instances of twospeaker overlaps have been extracted from 4 hours of talk. Two independent conversation analysts performed the interactional categorisation of overlaps into competitive and non-competitive for all these two-speaker overlap instances and achieved a good agreement of alpha=0.807 (Krippendorff 2004) as measured on a subset of 808 overlaps selected for our initial analysis. For the analysis of prosodic features we focus on F0 related features: mean, slope, span and contour, all of which have previously been shown to be used by each overlapping speaker separately for turn competition (Kurtic et al. 2009; Oertel et al. 2012). We investigate the similarity in F0 mean, slope and span by correlating these features across the two participants. For F0 contour, a similarity coefficient is computed using dynamic programming method described in Gorisch et al. (2012). We consider the difference in F0 contour similarity in competitive and non-competitive overlaps as an indication of intonational matching being a turn competitive resource. We conduct these analyses for overlaps that are clearly competitive or noncompetitive as indicated by inter-annotator agreement. In addition, we qualitatively explore those cases that annotators disagree on in order to investigate whether they reveal further important interactional or prosodic features of in-overlap talk. Our preliminary results suggest that conversational participants attend and adapt to the interlocutor during overlap depending on whether they return competition or not. We explain our findings in relation to previous work on turn competition in overlap, discuss the quantitative method employed and also address the possible consequences of our results for the study of prosodic realization of other social actions in conversation.
Catching the common cause: extraction and annotation of causal relations and their participants
(2017)
In this paper, we present a simple, yet effective method for the automatic identification and extraction of causal relations from text, based on a large English-German parallel corpus. The goal of this effort is to create a lexical resource for German causal relations. The resource will consist of a lexicon that describes constructions that trigger causality as well as the participants of the causal event, and will be augmented by a corpus with annotated instances for each entry, that can be used as training data to develop a system for automatic classification of causal relations. Focusing on verbs, our method harvested a set of 100 different lexical triggers of causality, including support verb constructions. At the moment, our corpus includes over 1,000 annotated instances. The lexicon and the annotated data will be made available to the research community.
Feedback utterances are among the most frequent in dialogue. Feedback is also a crucial aspect of linguistic theories that take social interaction, involving language, into account. This paper introduces the corpora and datasets of a project scrutinizing this kind of feedback utterances in French. We present the genesis of the corpora (for a total of about 16 hours of transcribed and phone force-aligned speech) involved in the project. We introduce the resulting datasets and discuss how they are being used in on-going work with focus on the form-function relationship of conversational feedback. All the corpora created and the datasets produced in the framework of this project will be made available for research purposes.
This paper presents a short insight into a new project at the "Institute for the German Language” (IDS) (Mannheim). It gives an insight into some basic ideas for a corpus-based dictionary of spoken German, which will be developed and compiled by the new project "The Lexicon of spoken German” (Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch, LeGeDe). The work is based on the "Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German” (Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch, FOLK), which is implemented in the "Database for Spoken German” (Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch, DGD). Both resources, the database and the corpus, have been developed at the IDS.