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A "polyglottal" speech synthesis - modifications for a replica of Kempelen's speaking machine
(2019)
This paper presents the prototype of a lexicographic resource for spoken German in interaction, which was conceived within the framework of the LeGeDe-project (LeGeDe=Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch). First of all, it summarizes the theoretical and methodological approaches that were used for the initial planning of the resource. The headword candidates were selected by analyzing corpus-based data. Therefore, the data of two corpora (written and spoken German) were compared with quantitative methods. The information that was gathered on the selected headword candidates can be assigned to two different sections: meanings and functions in interaction.
Additionally, two studies on the expectations of future users towards the resource were carried out. The results of these two studies were also taken into account in the development of the prototype. Focusing on the presentation of the resource’s content, the paper shows both the different lexicographical information in selected dictionary entries, and the information offered by the provided hyperlinks and external texts. As a conclusion, it summarizes the most important innovative aspects that were specifically developed for the implementation of such a resource.
We present a descriptive analysis on the two datasets from the shared task on Source, Subjective Expression and Target Extraction from Political Speeches (STEPS), the only existing German dataset for opinion role extraction of its size. Our analysis discusses the individual properties of the three components, subjective expressions, sources and targets and their relations towards each other. Our observations should help practitioners and researchers when building a system to extract opinion roles from German data.
Classical null hypothesis significance tests are not appropriate in corpus linguistics, because the randomness assumption underlying these testing procedures is not fulfilled. Nevertheless, there are numerous scenarios where it would be beneficial to have some kind of test in order to judge the relevance of a result (e.g. a difference between two corpora) by answering the question whether the attribute of interest is pronounced enough to warrant the conclusion that it is substantial and not due to chance. In this paper, I outline such a test.
A Supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets from German text
(2019)
We present the first systematic supervised learning approach for the extraction of opinion sources and targets on German language data. A wide choice of different features is presented, particularly syntactic features and generalization features. We point out specific differences between opinion sources and targets. Moreover, we explain why implicit sources can be extracted even with fairly generic features. In order to ensure comparability our classifier is trained and tested on the dataset of the STEPS shared task.
The Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012 seqq.) serves as an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, synthesizing an increasing number of lexicographical dictionaries and providing basic cross-resource search options. The paper discusses the far-reaching revision of the system’s conceptual, lexicographical and technological underpinnings currently under way, focussing on their relevance for multilingual loanword lexicography.
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//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.
We investigate whether prototypicality or prominence of semantic roles can account for role-related effects in sentence interpretation. We present two acceptability-rating experiments testing three different constructions: active, personal passive and DO-clefts involving the same type of transitive verbs that differ with respect to the agentive role features they select. Our results reveal that there is no cross-constructional advantage for prototypical roles (e.g., agents), hence disconfirming a central tenet of role prototypicality. Rather, acceptability clines depend on the construction under investigation, thereby highlighting different role features. This finding is in line with one core assumption of the prominence account stating that role features are flexibly highlighted depending on the discourse function of the respective construction.
Distributional models of word use constitute an indispensable tool in corpus based lexicological research for discovering paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic patterns (Belica et al. 2010). Recently, word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013) have revived the field by allowing to construct and analyze distributional models on very large corpora. This is accomplished by reducing the very high dimensionality of word cooccurrence contexts, the size of the vocabulary, to few dimensions, such as 100-200. However, word use and meaning can vary widely along dimensions such as domain, register, and time, and word embeddings tend to represent only the most prevalent meaning. In this paper we thus construct domain specific word embeddings to allow for systematically analyzing variations in word use. Moreover, we also demonstrate how to reconstruct domain specific co-occurrence contexts from the dense word embeddings.
Common Crawl is a considerably large, heterogeneous multilingual corpus comprised of crawled documents from the internet, surpassing 20TB of data and distributed as a set of more than 50 thousand plain text files where each contains many documents written in a wide variety of languages. Even though each document has a metadata block associated to it, this data lacks any information about the language in which each document is written, making it extremely difficult to use Common Crawl for monolingual applications. We propose a general, highly parallel, multithreaded pipeline to clean and classify Common Crawl by language; we specifically design it so that it runs efficiently on medium to low resource infrastructures where I/O speeds are the main constraint. We develop the pipeline so that it can be easily reapplied to any kind of heterogeneous corpus and so that it can be parameterised to a wide range of infrastructures. We also distribute a 6.3TB version of Common Crawl, filtered, classified by language, shuffled at line level in order to avoid copyright issues, and ready to be used for NLP applications.
This paper describes a rule-based approach to detect direct speech without the help of any quotation markers. As datasets fictional and non-fictional texts were used. Our evaluation shows that the results appear stable throughout different datasets in the fictional domain and are comparable to the results achieved in related work.
Canadian heritage German across three generations: A diary-based study of language shift in action
(2019)
It is well known that migration has an effect on language use and language choice. If the language of origin is maintained after migration, it tends to change in the new contact setting. Often, migrants shift to the new majority language within few generations. The current paper examines a diary corpus containing data from three generations of one German-Canadian family, ranging from 1867 to 1909, and covering the second to fourth generation after immigration. The paper analyzes changes that can be observed between the generations, with respect to the language system as well as to the individuals’ decision on language choice. The data not only offer insight into the dynamics of acquiring a written register of a heritage language, and the eventual shift to the majority language. They also allow us to identify different linguistic profiles of heritage speakers within one community. It is discussed how these profiles can be linked to the individuals’ family backgrounds and how the combination of these backgrounds may have contributed to giving up the heritage language in favor of the majority language.
We present web services implementing a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following TEI guidelines, in particular ISO 24624:2016 "Language resource management - Transcription of spoken language". The web services are available at our website and will be available via the CLARIN infrastructure, including the Virtual Language Observatory and WebLicht.
Since 2013 representatives of several French and German CMC corpus projects have developed three customizations of the TEI-P5 standard for text encoding in order to adapt the encoding schema and models provided by the TEI to the structural peculiarities of CMC discourse. Based on the three schema versions, a 4th version has been created which takes into account the experiences from encoding our corpora and which is specifically designed for the submission of a feature request to the TEI council. On our poster we would present the structure of this schema and its relations (commonalities and differences) to the previous schemas.
Colonial studies
(2019)
Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other.
The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar.
The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.
Are borrowed neologisms accepted more slowly into the German language than German words resulting from the application of wrd formation rules? This study addresses this question by focusing on two possible indicators for the acceptance of neologisms: a) frequency development of 239 German neologisms from the 1990s (loanwords as well as new words resulting from the application of word formation rules) in the German reference corpus DEREKO and b) frequency development in the use of pragmatic markers (‘flags’, namely quotation marks and phrases such as sogenannt ‘so-called’) with these words. In the second part of the article, a psycholinguistic approach to evaluating the (psychological) status of different neologisms and non-words in an experimentally controlled study and plans to carry out interviews in a field test to collect speakers’ opinions on the acceptance of the analysed neologisms are outlined. Finally, implications for the lexicographic treatment of both types of neologisms are discussed.
The paper deals with the process of computer-aided transcription regarding Arabic-German data material for interaction-based studies. First of all, it sheds light upon some major methodological challenges posed by the conversation-analytic approaches: due to current corpus technology, the reciprocity, linearity, and simultaneity of linguistic activities cannot be reconstructed in an analytically proper way when using the Arabic characters in multilingual and bidirectional transcripts. The difficulty of transcribing Arabic encounters is also compounded by the fact that Spoken Arabic as well as its varieties and phenomena have not been standardised enough (for conversation-analytic purposes). Therefore, the second part of this paper is dedicated to preliminary, self-developed solutions, namely a systematic method for transcribing Spoken Arabic.
The recognizability of a stretch of conduct as social action depends on details of turn construction as well as the turn’s context. We examine details of turn construction as they enter into actions offering interpretations of prior talk. Such actions either initiate repair or formulate a conclusion from prior talk. We focus on how interpretation markers (das heißt [“that means”] vs. du meinst [“you mean”]) and interpretation formats (phrasal vs. clausal turn completions) each make their invariant contribution to specific interpreting practices. Interpretation marker and turn format go hand in hand, which leads to distinct patterns of interpreting practices: Das heißt+clause is especially apt for formulations, du meinst+phrase for repair. The results suggest that details of turn construction can systematically enter into the constitution of social action. Data are in German with English translation.
In this paper, we present our work-inprogress to automatically identify free indirect representation (FI), a type of thought representation used in literary texts. With a deep learning approach using contextual string embeddings, we achieve f1 scores between 0.45 and 0.5 (sentence-based evaluation for the FI category) on two very different German corpora, a clear improvement on earlier attempts for this task. We show how consistently marked direct speech can help in this task. In our evaluation, we also consider human inter-annotator scores and thus address measures of certainty for this difficult phenomenon.
This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages - Flemish, French, German, and Italian - it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive definitional component (‘definiendum is Y’). The analysis shows that by employing this format, speakers display sensitivity towards a potential meaning of the definiendum that recipients could have taken to be valid. By negating this meaning, speakers discard this possible, yet unintended understanding. The format serves three distinct interactional purposes: (a) it is used for argumentation, e.g. in discussions and political debates, (b) it works as a resource for imparting knowledge, e.g. in expert talk and instructions, and (c) it is employed, in ordinary conversation, for securing the addressee's correct understanding of a possibly problematic expression. The findings contribute to our understanding of how epistemic claims and displays relate to the turn-constructional and sequential organization of talk. They also show that the much quoted ‘problem of meaning’ is, first and foremost, a participant's problem.
In this chapter, we discuss steps toward extending CMDI’s semantic interoperability beyond the Social Sciences and Humanities: We stress the need for an initial data curation step, in part supported by a relation registry that helps impose some structure on CMDI vocabulary; we describe the use of authority file information and other controlled vocabulary to help connecting CMDI-based metadata to existing Linked Data; we show how significant parts of CMDI-based metadata can be converted to bibliographic metadata standards and hence entered into library catalogs; and finally we describe first steps to convert CMDI-based metadata to RDF. The initial grassroots approach of CMDI (meaning that anybody can define metadata descriptors and components) mirrors the AAA slogan of the Semantic Web (“Anyone can say Anything about Any topic”). Ironically, this makes it hard to fully link CMDI-based metadata to other Semantic Web datasets. This paper discusses the challenges of this enterprise.
We examine the new task of detecting derogatory compounds (e.g. curry muncher). Derogatory compounds are much more difficult to detect than derogatory unigrams (e.g. idiot) since they are more sparsely represented in lexical resources previously found effective for this task (e.g. Wiktionary). We propose an unsupervised classification approach that incorporates linguistic properties of compounds. It mostly depends on a simple distributional representation. We compare our approach against previously established methods proposed for extracting derogatory unigrams.
Automatic division of spoken language transcripts into sentence-like units is a challenging problem, caused by disfluencies, ungrammatical structures and the lack of punctuation. We present experiments on dividing up German spoken dialogues where we investigate the impact of task setup and data representation, encoding of context information as well as different model architectures for this task.
We discuss the impact of data bias on abusive language detection. We show that classification scores on popular datasets reported in previous work are much lower under realistic settings in which this bias is reduced. Such biases are most notably observed on datasets that are created by focused sampling instead of random sampling. Datasets with a higher proportion of implicit abuse are more affected than datasets with a lower proportion.
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.
Modern theoretical linguistics lives by the insight that the meanings of complex expressions derive from the meanings of their parts and the way these are composed. However, the currently dominating theories of the syntax-semantics interface hastily relegate important aspects of meaning which cannot readily be aligned with visible structure to empty projecting heads non-reductively (mainstream Generative Grammar) or to the syntactic construction holistically (Construction Grammar). This book develops an alternative, compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal and comparative meanings of a range of productive constructions of which pseudorefl exive, excessive and directional complement constructions take center stage. Accordingly, a contradiction-inducing hence semantically problematic part of literally coded meaning is locally ignored and systematically realized „expatriately“ with respect to parts of structure that achieve the indexical anchoring of propositional contents in terms of times, worlds and standards of comparison, thus yielding the observed hidden meanings.
Linguistic relativists have traditionally asked 'how language influences thought', but conversation analysts and anthropological linguists have moved the focus from thought to social action. We argue that 'social action' should in this context not become simply a new dependent variable, because the formulation 'does language influence action' suggests that social action would already be meaningfully constituted prior to its local (verbal and multi-modal) accomplishment. We draw on work by the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker to show that close attention to action-in-a-situation helps us ground empirical work on cross-cultural diversity in an appreciation of the invariances that make culture-specific elements of practice meaningful.
This paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
Starting from early approaches within Generative Grammar in the late 1960s, the article describes and discusses the development of different theoretical frameworks of lexical decomposition of verbs. It presents the major subsequent conceptions of lexical decompositions, namely, Dowty’s approach to lexical decomposition within Montague Semantics, Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics, the LCS decompositions emerging from the MIT Lexicon Project, Pustejovsky’s Event Structure Theory, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wunderlich’s Lexical Decompositional Grammar, Hale and Kayser’s Lexical Relational Structures, and Distributed Morphology. For each of these approaches, (i) it sketches their origins and motivation, (ii) it describes the general structure of decompositions and their location within the theory, (iii) it explores their explanative value for major phenomena of verb semantics and syntax, (iv) and it briefly evaluates the impact of the theory. Referring to discussions in article 7 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Engelberg) Lexical decomposition, a number of theoretical topics are taken up throughout the paper concerning the interpretation of decompositions, the basic inventory of decompositional predicates, the location of decompositions on the different levels of linguistic representation (syntactic, semantic, conceptual), and the role they play for the interfaces between these levels.
This paper discusses German neologisms in the so-called “new-media” and presents a German corpus-based online dictionary of neologisms. Several neological morphemes and lexemes, as well as their meaning will be presented, showing that these new modes of communication are an important source of enrichment of German lexicon.
Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.
Smooth turn-taking in conversation depends in part on speakers being able to communicate their intention to hold or cede the floor. Both prosodic and gestural cues have been shown to be used in this context. We investigate the interplay of pitch movements and hand gestures at locations at which speaker change becomes relevant, comparing their use in German and Swedish. We find that there are some shared functions of prosody and gesture with regard to turn-taking in the two languages, but that these shared functions appear to be mediated by the different phonological demands on pitch in the two languages.
This chapter investigates differences in language regards in Latvia and Estonia. Based on the results of a survey that had about 1000 respondents in each country, it analyses general views on languages and language-learning motivation, as well as specific regards of Estonian, Latvian, Russian, English, German and other languages. The results show that languages and language learning are generally important for the respondents; language-learning motivation is overwhelmingly instrumental. Besides the obvious value of the titular languages of each country, English and Russian are to differing degrees considered of importance for professional and leisure purposes, ahead of German, Finnish (in Estonia) and French, whereas other languages are of little relevance. In more emotionally related categories, differences are more salient. L1-speakers of Russian differ in their views from L1-speakers of Estonian and Latvian, indicating that the linguistic acculturation of society in Estonia tends to be more monodirectional towards Estonian, whereas in Latvia there are more bidirectional tendencies as both Latvian and Russian L1-speakers regard each other’s languages as at least moderately relevant.
The present paper examines a variety of ways in which the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa) can be used. A multitude of examples intends to highlight a wide range of interrogation possibilities that CoRoLa opens for different types of users. The querying of CoRoLa displayed here is supported by the KorAP frontend, through the querying language Poliqarp. Interrogations address annotation layers, such as the lexical, morphological and, in the near future, the syntactical layer, as well as the metadata. Other issues discussed are how to build a virtual corpus, how to deal with errors, how to find expressions and how to identify expressions.
The present thesis investigates the syntagmatic relations of certain Finnish emotion verbs that are formed by the derivational suffix -ua/-yä (e.g. suuttua ‘get angry’, pelästyä ‘get frightened’). Prototypically, the suffix expresses reflexivity, but in the case of the “inchoative” emotion verbs, it indicates a change of state on behalf of the experiencer, from a non-emotional state to an emotional state.
This paper asks whether and in which ways managing coordination tasks in traffic involve the accomplishment of intersubjectivity. Taking instances of coordinating passing an obstacle with oncoming traffic as the empirical case, four different practices were found.
1. Intersubjectivity can be presupposed by expecting others to stick to the traffic code and other mutually shared expectations.
2. Intersubjective solutions emerge step by step by mutual responsive-anticipatory adaptation of driving decisions.
3. Intersubjectivity can be accomplished by explicit interactive negotiation of passages.
4. Coordination problems can be solved without relying on intersubjectivity by unilateral, responsive-anticipatory adaptation to others’ behaviors.
Introduction
(2019)
Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
Research on language politics, policy, and planning is of importance to contact linguistics, since political relations between groups of language users, the way in which the use of language(s) is organized, and how language issues are politicized fundamentally shape the political and social conditions under which language varieties are in contact. This chapter first provides a short sketch of how language policy, planning, and politics have so far been conceptualized. Major subfields will be discussed, and then relevant actors and factors in these processes will be introduced. At the end, these aspects will be discussed from a contact linguistic perspective and summarized in a graphic visualization.