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ZuRecht steht für Zugang zur Recherche in Transkripten. Es handelt sich um eine prototypische Implementierung einer webbasierten grafischen Benutzeroberfläche, welche Zugriff auf Transkripte gesprochener Sprache aus dem Archiv für Gesprochenes Deutsch (AGD) des Leibniz-Instituts für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) bietet. Der Zugriff erfolgt über die neue, im Projekt „ZuMult“ entwickelte Schnittstelle zur Suche in mündlichen Korpora. ZuRecht dient einerseits der Demonstration der Möglichkeiten der neuen Schnittstelle, indem es komplexe Suchanfragen mit der speziell für die Korpusrecherche entwickelten Anfragesprache CQP auf Transkriptionen gesprochener Sprache erlaubt. Andererseits kommt ZuRecht als Erweiterung der Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch (DGD) zum Einsatz und eröffnet den DGD-Nutzer:innen viele neue Forschungsmöglichkeiten, insbesondere auf den Gebieten der Gesprächsanalyse und der DaF/DaZ-bezogenen Forschung. Im Beitrag werden die Funktionalitäten von ZuRecht ausführlich vorgestellt und ihre Einsatzmöglichkeiten in den genannten Disziplinen exemplarisch vorgeführt.
Im vorliegenden Artikel wird ein Überblick über das von der DFG geförderte Projekt Zugänge zu multimodalen Korpora gesprochener Sprache – Vernetzung und zielgruppenspezifische Ausdifferenzierung (ZuMult) gegeben. Dabei wird zunächst auf die Sprachdaten und auf die technische Basis der Applikationen eingegangen, die dem Projekt zugrunde liegen. Im Anschluss werden die weiteren Beiträge in diesem Themenheft von KorDaF kurz vorgestellt. Übergeordnetes Thema von ZuMult ist die Verbesserung der Zugänglichkeit von digitalen mündlichen Sprachdaten für verschiedene Anwendungen und Zielgruppen, wobei der Fokus dieses Themenhefts auf Applikationen und Anwender:innen aus der Fremdsprachendidaktik und der DaF-/DaZ-Forschung und -Lehre liegt. Die einzelnen Beiträge beleuchten zentrale methodische und/oder technische Aspekte dieses Themas und beschreiben die Architektur und verschiedene prototypische Anwendungen, die das Projekt entwickelt hat.
In this presentation I show first results from an ongoing study about syntactic complexity of sanctioning turns in spoken language. This study is part of a larger project on sanctioning of misconduct in social interaction in different European languages (English, German, Italian and Polish). For the study I use video recordings of different everyday settings (family breakfasts, board game interactions and car rides) with three or four participants. These data come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction (Kornfeld/Küttner/Zinken 2023; Küttner et al. submitted). I focus on sanctioning turns with more than one turn-constructional unit (see among others for TCUs: Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974; Clayman 2013). The study asks how often TCUs are linked to each other in the different languages, for what function, and how language diversity enters into this. Note that complex sanctioning turns do not always come as complex sentences.
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.
This contribution investigates the use of the Czech particle jako (“like”/“as”) in naturally occurring conversations. Inspired by interactional research on unfinished or suspended utterances and on turn-final conjunctions and particles, the analysis aims to trace the possible development of jako from conjunction to a tag-like particle that can be exploited for mobilizing affiliative responses. Traditionally, jako has been described as conjunction used for comparing two elements or for providing a specification of a first element [“X (is) like Y”]. In spoken Czech, however, jako can be flexibly positioned within a speaking turn and does not seem to operate as a coordinating or hypotactic conjunction. As a result, prior studies have described jako as a polyfunctional particle. This article will try to shed light on the meaning of jako in spoken discourse by focusing on its apparent fuzzy or “filler” uses, i.e., when it is found in a mid-turn position in multi-unit turns and in the immediate vicinity of hesitations, pauses, and turn suspensions. Based on examples from mundane, video-recorded conversations and on a sequential and multimodal approach to social interaction, the analyses will first show that jako frequently frames discursive objects that co-participants should respond to. By using jako before a pause and concurrently adopting specific embodied displays, participants can more explicitly seek to mobilize responsive action. Moreover, as jako tends to cluster in multi-unit turns involving the formulation of subjective experience or stance, it can be shown to be specifically designed for mobilizing affiliative responses. Finally, it will be argued that the potential of jako to open up interactive turn spaces can be linked to the fundamental comparative semantics of the original conjunction.
Dieser Beitrag skizziert einen paradoxen Wandelprozess, den wir „Denaturierung" nennen: Ursprünglich natürlichsprachige, orale, ersterworbene Varietäten werden durch sprachplanerische Maßnahmen zu literalen, nicht ersterworbenen Systemen. Wir diskutieren zunächst die Grundlagen dieses Prozesses: Die Literalisierung von Sprachsystemen und Gesellschaften bringt orale Non-Standard-Varietäten in funktionale Konkurrenzsituationen mit Standardvarietäten. Der Wunsch nach Bewahrung und (Re-)Vitalisierung dieser Varietäten erzwingt - um ihre funktionale Leistungsfähigkeit auszubauen - Standardisierungsprozesse der betroffenen Varietäten, wodurch in ihren Systemen Elemente auftreten, die nicht durch L1-Erwerb weitergegeben werden (können). Paradoxerweise soll also das Verschwinden natürlicher Sprachen (der muttersprachlich erworbenen Dialekte), die sich definitorisch gerade durch die funktionale Distanz zur Standardsprache auszeichnen, durch Eingriffe unterbunden werden, die ihrem Status als natürliche Sprachen entgegenwirken. Wir postulieren, dass diese Denaturierung eine Konsequenz der Faktoren Attrition und Standardisierung ist. Dazu illustrieren und kontrastieren wir den Verlauf dieses Prozesses anhand von drei germanischen Varietäten: Während das Bairische noch am Anfang einer möglichen Denaturierung steht, kann das sowohl von starker Attrition als auch gezielter Standardisierung betroffene Niederdeutsche in dieser Hinsicht bereits als fortgeschritten angesehen werden. Im modernen Färöischen, wo bei bewahrter hoher mündlicher Variation eine stark historisierende, unifizierende Schriftvarietät installiert wurde, fällt die Denaturierung mangels Attrition dagegen nur schwach aus.
Dieser Beitrag analysiert, wie sich Verbosität als Widerstandsphänomen sprachlich-interaktional manifestiert. Widerstand gilt in der psychodynamischen Therapie als Schutzfunktion der Patienten vor Veränderung, die den Fortschritt der Therapie hemmt, ist aus therapeutischer Sicht jedoch ein wertvoller Indikator für dahinterliegende, bedeutungsvolle Erfahrungen der Patienten. Gegenstand der Analyse sind drei Fallbeispiele aufgezeichneter ambulanter, psychodynamischer Therapiesitzungen. Die folgenden Merkmale von Verbosität sind Ergebnisse der Untersuchung: a) eine Themenverschiebung zu Beginn der jeweiligen Erzählung; b) Erzählgegenstand sind dritte, nicht anwesende Personen und/oder alltägliche Begebenheiten; c) Emotionen werden wenig oder gar nicht thematisiert; d) die Erzählungen weisen einen hohen Detailliertheitsgrad auf. Therapeuten behandeln die Erzählungen nur implizit als verbos durch eine zunächst abwartende Haltung, wenig bis keine Nachfragen sowie die Thematisierung von Emotionen und der Bedeutung des Gesagten für die Patienten selbst. Außerdem lenken sie das Gespräch auf die Patienten bzw. auf das vorherige Gesprächsthema oder übertragen die erzählte Geschichte auf die aktuelle Gesprächssituation.
This paper describes the TEI-based ISO standard 24624:2016 ‘Transcription of spoken language’ and other formats used within CLARIN for spoken language resources. It assesses the current state of support for the standard and the interoperability between these formats and with rele- vant tools and services. The main idea behind the paper is that a digital infrastructure providing language resources and services to researchers should also allow the combined use of resources and/or services from different contexts. This requires syntactic and semantic interoperability. We propose a solution based on the ISO/TEI format and describe the necessary steps for this format to work as an exchange format with basic semantic interoperability for spoken language resources across the CLARIN infrastructure and beyond.
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.
Spontan kreierte Okkasionalismen sind rekurrenter Bestandteil verbaler Interaktionen. Vor dem Hintergrund, dass die Bedeutung von Okkasionalismen nicht konventionalisiert und damit potenziell unbekannt ist, untersucht der vorliegende Beitrag aus gesprächsanalytischer Perspektive die Frage, unter welchen Bedingungen die Bedeutung okkasioneller Ausdrücke in Folgeäußerungen selbstinitiiert oder fremdinitiiert erklärt wird und wann dies nicht der Fall ist. Es zeigt sich, dass die überwältigende Mehrheit der 1.068 analysierten Okkasionalismen aus verschiedenen Gründen kein Verstehensproblem darstellt. Wird die Bedeutung eines Okkasionalismus dennoch selbstinitiiert erklärt, dient dies oft anderen Zwecken als der Verstehenssicherung. Wird dagegen die Bedeutung eines nicht problemlos erschließbaren Okkasionalismus nicht unmittelbar selbstinitiiert erläutert, dient der ‚rätselhafte‘ Ausdruck als interaktive Ressource dazu, Rezipient/-innen neugierig zu machen, Nachfragen zu elizitieren und damit Folgeäußerungen zu lizenzieren.
This paper presents observations on the phonetic realisations of the German particles ja – ‘yes’ and naja – approximately ‘well’. As part of a large-scale study on the particle ja, we identified numerous instances in the dataset that had been orthographically transcribed as ja, but were phonetically realised as [nja]. Using phonetic and functional parameters, we explore the question whether these instances can be attributed to either the lexeme ja or naja. While phonetic measurements yield ambivalent results, analyses of pragmatic parameters such as function and turn position seem to indicate that [nja] was predominantly intended to be ja, although some functional differences between ja and [nja] could also be identified.
This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on the International Corpus of English (ICE). As such, ICC will contain approximately the same balance of forty percent of written language and 60 percent of spoken language distributed across 27 different text types and contexts. A number of issues encountered by the project teams are discussed, ranging from copyright and data sustainability to technical advances in data distribution.
Der Beitrag beschreibt die Entwicklung und Anwendung des TEI-basierten ISO-Standards ISO 24624:2016 Transcription of spoken language, der seit einigen Jahren für gesprochensprachliche Forschungsdaten aus unterschiedlichen Kontexten eingesetzt wird. Ein standardisiertes Dateiformat ermöglicht Interoperabilität zwischen verschiedenen Werkzeugen und weiteren Angeboten von Datenzentren und Infrastrukturen. Durch die methodologisch fundierte Abwägung zwischen Standardisierung und Flexibilität kann der ISO/TEI-Standard zudem Forschungsdaten aus verschiedenen Forschungskontexten abbilden, und so interdisziplinäre Vorhaben erleichtern. Der Beitrag stellt einige Anwendungsbereiche aus dem Lebenszyklus gesprochensprachlicher Forschungsdaten vor, in denen auf dem ISO/TEI-Standard basierenden Erweiterungen existierender Softwarelösungen erfolgreich umgesetzt werden konnten, und zeigt weitere Beispiele für die zunehmende Verbreitung des Formats.
In this paper, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
Das Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) ist mit seinem Design bislang vornehmlich auf Nutzergruppen aus der sprachwissenschaftlichen Forschung ausgerichtet, prinzipiell aber auch hervorragend dafür geeignet, für die Nutzung im handlungsorientierten DaF- (und eventuell auch DaZ-)Unterricht fruchtbar gemacht zu werden. Lehrende und Lernende des Deutschen als Fremd- oder Zweitsprache bilden eine gesellschaftlich zunehmend relevante Zielgruppe und auch einen beträchtlichen Anteil der registrierten NutzerInnen des Korpus. Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll daher anhand eines exemplarischen Annotationsprojekts gezeigt werden, inwiefern die besonderen Ressourcen und Potentiale von FOLK für den DaF-Unterricht und dort speziell für den Aspekt des authentischen, kompetenten sprachlichen Handelns in Interaktion sinnvoll aufbereitet und schrittweise zugänglicher gemacht werden können.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2020)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk-in-interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants' ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their Orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discusscd in this paper are verb-derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio- and video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
Sogenannte „Pragmatikalisierte Mehrworteinheiten“ sind im Deutschen hochfrequent und unterliegen bisweilen tiefgreifenden phonetischen Reduktionsprozessen. Diese können Realisierungsvarianten hervorbringen, die in der Rückschau auf mehr als eine lexematische Ursprungsform zurückführbar sind. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht mit [ˈzɐmɐ] einen besonders prägnanten Fall dieser Art anhand eines Perzeptionsexperimentes.
We present web services which implement a workflow for transcripts of spoken language following the 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.
CLARIN contractual framework for sharing language data: the perspective of personal data protection
(2020)
The article analyses the responsibility for ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in research settings. As a general rule, organisations are considered the data controller (responsible party for the GDPR compliance). Research constitutes a unique setting influenced by academic freedom. This raises the question of whether academics could be considered the controller as well. However, there are some court cases and policy documents on this issue. It is not settled yet. The analysis serves a preliminary analytical background for redesigning CLARIN contractual framework for sharing data.
As a part of the ZuMult-project, we are currently modelling a backend architecture that should provide query access to corpora from the Archive of Spoken German (AGD) at the Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS). We are exploring how to reuse existing search engine frameworks providing full text indices and allowing to query corpora by one of the corpus query languages (QLs) established and actively used in the corpus research community. For this purpose, we tested MTAS - an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying on text with multilevel annotations. We applied MTAS on three oral corpora stored in the TEI-based ISO standard for transcriptions of spoken language (ISO 24624:2016). These corpora differ from the corpus data that MTAS was developed for, because they include interactions with two and more speakers and are enriched, inter alia, with timeline-based annotations. In this contribution, we report our test results and address issues that arise when search frameworks originally developed for querying written corpora are being transferred into the field of spoken language.
This article describes the development of the digital infrastructure at a research data centre for audio-visual linguistic research data, the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) at the University of Hamburg in Germany, over the past ten years. The typical resource hosted in the HZSK Repository, the core component of the infrastructure, is a collection of recordings with time-aligned transcripts and additional contextual data, a spoken language corpus. Since the centre has a thematic focus on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and provides its service to researchers within linguistics and other disciplines, the development of the infrastructure was driven by diverse usage scenarios and user needs on the one hand, and by the common technical requirements for certified service centres of the CLARIN infrastructure on the other. Beyond the technical details, the article also aims to be a contribution to the discussion on responsibilities and services within emerging digital research data infrastructures and the fundamental issues in sustainability of research software engineering, concluding that in order to truly cater to user needs across the research data lifecycle, we still need to bridge the gap between discipline-specific research methods in the process of digitalisation and generic digital research data management approaches.
This paper describes the development of a systematic approach to the creation, management and curation of linguistic resources, particularly spoken language corpora. It also presents first steps towards a framework for continuous quality control to be used within external research projects by non-technical users, and discuss various domain and discipline specific problems and individual solutions. The creation of spoken language corpora is not only a time-consuming and costly process, but the created resources often represent intangible cultural heritage, containing recordings of, for example, extinct languages or historical events. Since high quality resources are needed to enable re-use in as many future contexts as possible, researchers need to be provided with the necessary means for quality control. We believe that this includes methods and tools adapted to Humanities researchers as non-technical users, and that these methods and tools need to be developed to support existing tasks and goals of research projects.
Im Beitrag steht das LeGeDe-Drittmittelprojekt und der im Laufe der Projektzeit entwickelte korpusbasierte lexikografische Prototyp zu Besonderheiten des gesprochenen Deutsch in der Interaktion im Zentrum der Betrachtung. Die Entwicklung einer lexikografischen Ressource dieser Art knüpft an die vielfältigen Erfahrungen in der Erstellung von korpusbasierten Onlinewörterbüchern (insbesondere am Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim) und an aktuelle Methoden der korpusbasierten Lexikologie sowie der Interaktionsanalyse an und nimmt als multimedialer Prototyp für die korpusbasierte lexikografische Behandlung von gesprochensprachlichen Phänomenen eine innovative Position in der modernen Onlinelexikografie ein. Der Beitrag befasst sich im Abschnitt zur LeGeDe-Projektpräsentation ausführlich mit projektrelevanten Forschungsfragen, Projektzielen, der empirischen Datengrundlage und empirisch erhobenen Erwartungshaltungen an eine Ressource zum gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Darstellung der komplexen Struktur des LeGeDe-Prototyps wird mit zahlreichen Beispielen illustriert. In Verbindung mit der zentralen Information zur Makro- und Mikrostruktur und den lexikografischen Umtexten werden die vielfältigen Vernetzungs- und Zugriffsstrukturen aufgezeigt. Ergänzend zum abschließenden Fazit liefert der Beitrag in einem Ausblick umfangreiche Vorschläge für die zukünftige lexikografische Arbeit mit gesprochensprachlichen Korpusdaten.
This paper presents the corpus-based lexicographical prototype that was developed within the framework of the project Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch (=LeGeDe) as a thirdparty funded project. Research results regarding the information offered in dictionaries have shown that there is a necessity for information on spoken lexis and its interactional functions. The resulting LeGeDe-prototype is based on these needs and desiderata and is thus an innovative example for the adequate representation of spoken language in online dictionaries. It is available online since September 2019 (https://www.owid.de/legede/). In the following sections, after first focusing on the presentation of the project’s goals, the data basis, the intended end user, and the applied methods, we will illustrate the microstructure of the prototype and the information provided in a dictionary entry based on the lemma eben. Finally, we will summarize innovative aspects that are important for the implementation of such a resource.
This paper presents experiments on sentence boundary detection in transcripts of spoken dialogues. Segmenting spoken language into sentence-like units is a challenging task, due to disfluencies, ungrammatical or fragmented structures and the lack of punctuation. In addition, one of the main bottlenecks for many NLP applications for spoken language is the small size of the training data, as the transcription and annotation of spoken language is by far more time-consuming and labour-intensive than processing written language. We therefore investigate the benefits of data expansion and transfer learning and test different ML architectures for this task. Our results show that data expansion is not straightforward and even data from the same domain does not always improve results. They also highlight the importance of modelling, i.e. of finding the best architecture and data representation for the task at hand. For the detection of boundaries in spoken language transcripts, we achieve a substantial improvement when framing the boundary detection problem as a sentence pair classification task, as compared to a sequence tagging approach.
We present a fine-grained NER annotations scheme with 30 labels and apply it to German data. Building on the OntoNotes 5.0 NER inventory, our scheme is adapted for a corpus of transcripts of biographic interviews by adding categories for AGE and LAN(guage) and also adding label classes for various numeric and temporal expressions. Applying the scheme to the spoken data as well as a collection of teaser tweets from newspaper sites, we can confirm its generality for both domains, also achieving good inter-annotator agreement. We also show empirically how our inventory relates to the well-established 4-category NER inventory by re-annotating a subset of the GermEval 2014 NER coarse-grained dataset with our fine label inventory. Finally, we use a BERT-based system to establish some baselines for NER tagging on our two new datasets. Global results in in-domain testing are quite high on the two datasets, near what was achieved for the coarse inventory on the CoNLLL2003 data. Cross-domain testing produces much lower results due to the severe domain differences.
I’ve got a construction looks funny – representing and recovering non-standard constructions in UD
(2020)
The UD framework defines guidelines for a crosslingual syntactic analysis in the framework of dependency grammar, with the aim of providing a consistent treatment across languages that not only supports multilingual NLP applications but also facilitates typological studies. Until now, the UD framework has mostly focussed on bilexical grammatical relations. In the paper, we propose to add a constructional perspective and discuss several examples of spoken-language constructions that occur in multiple languages and challenge the current use of basic and enhanced UD relations. The examples include cases where the surface relations are deceptive, and syntactic amalgams that either involve unconnected subtrees or structures with multiply-headed dependents. We argue that a unified treatment of constructions across languages will increase the consistency of the UD annotations and thus the quality of the treebanks for linguistic analysis.
Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte ('I thought') in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for English I thought are also routinely used in German: ich dachte is a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition, ich dachte is also used to account for the speaker's own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover, ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations of ich dachte.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit dem Gebrauch von konnektintegrierbaren Konnektoren im gesprochenen Deutsch. Die Analyse wird am Beispiel der Adverbkonnektoren deshalb und deswegen als Korrelate zum Subjunktor weil und ausgehend von theoretischen Prämissen aus der traditionellen Grammatik und aus der Gesprächsforschung durchgeführt. Der Gebrauch der genannten Konnektoren wird innerhalb einer Auswahl von Korpusdaten gesprochener Sprache beobachtet, die mehrere verschiedene Gattungen der alltäglichen bzw. der institutionellen Kommunikation umfasst.
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.
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.
In this paper, we describe a data processing pipeline used for annotated spoken corpora of Uralic languages created in the INEL (Indigenous Northern Eurasian Languages) project. With this processing pipeline we convert the data into a loss-less standard format (ISO/TEI) for long-term preservation while simultaneously enabling a powerful search in this version of the data. For each corpus, the input we are working with is a set of files in EXMARaLDA XML format, which contain transcriptions, multimedia alignment, morpheme segmentation and other kinds of annotation. The first step of processing is the conversion of the data into a certain subset of TEI following the ISO standard ’Transcription of spoken language’ with the help of an XSL transformation. The primary purpose of this step is to obtain a representation of our data in a standard format, which will ensure its long-term accessibility. The second step is the conversion of the ISO/TEI files to a JSON format used by the “Tsakorpus” search platform. This step allows us to make the corpora available through a web-based search interface. As an addition, the existence of such a converter allows other spoken corpora with ISO/TEI annotation to be made accessible online in the future.
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 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.
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.
In the project LeGeDe („Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch”), we are developing a corpus-based lexicographical resource focusing on features of the lexicon of spoken German. To investigate the expectations of future users, two studies were conducted: interviews with a smaller group of experts and a large-scale online survey. We report on selected results, mainly from the online survey and with a focus on the learning perspective. We want to show if and to which extent the L2-learners’
expectations differ from those of native speakers and in which aspects the two groups agree. We also want to give an outlook on the possibilities that will be available to learners in the planned lexicographical resource.
Die 21. Arbeitstagung zur Gesprächsforschung mit dem Rahmenthema „Vergleichende Gesprächsforschung“ fand vom 21.–23. März 2018 am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim statt. Das Ziel der Tagung war es, Forscherinnen und Forscher zusammenzubringen, die authentische Interaktionsdaten aus vergleichender Perspektive untersuchen. Das Rahmenthema der Tagung ergab sich aus dem steigenden Interesse an vergleichenden Fragestellungen innerhalb konversations- und gesprächsanalytischer Untersuchungen. Die Tagung nahm gezielt Vorgehensweisen und Methoden bei der Durchführung vergleichender Untersuchungen in den Blick. Die Vorträge, Projektpräsentationen und Datensitzungen erörterten 1. das Vergleichen als analytische Grundoperation der Konversations- und Gesprächsanalyse, 2. Vergleiche alternativer Ressourcen und Praktiken für spezifische Handlungen und Aktivitäten in der Interaktion sowie 3. methodologische Herausforderungen einer vergleichenden Gesprächsforschung.
Im vorliegenden Artikel werden einleitend Gegenstand, Fragestellung und Ziele einer Studie zu „absoluten“ Verwendungen von Modalverben in verbaler Interaktion vorgestellt, gefolgt von Bemerkungen zu Forschungskontext, Theorie, Methodik und Datengrundlage. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung werden unter drei Perspektiven präsentiert: Erstens geht es um Modalverbverwendungen, die sich in der Forschung zwischen Vollverbund Ellipsenerklärungen verorten, zweitens um Strukturen mit (grammatischen) Kontextbezügen, drittens um Konstruktionen und usuelle Handlungsformate. Den Abschluss bilden eine Diskussion der Befunde und ein Ausblick auf Vermittlungspotenziale interaktionslinguistischer Befunde im Bereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit dem computergestützten Transkriptionsverfahren arabisch-deutscher Gesprächsdaten für interaktionsbezogene Untersuchungen auseinander. Zunächst werden wesentliche methodische Herausforderungen der gesprächsanalytischen Arbeit adressiert: Hinsichtlich der derzeitigen Korpustechnologie ermöglicht die Verwendung von arabischen Schriftzeichen in einem mehrsprachigen, bidirektionalen Transkript keine analysegerechte Rekonstruktion von Reziprozität, Linearität und Simultaneität sprachlichen Handelns. Zudem ist die Verschriftung von arabischen Gesprächsdaten aufgrund der unzureichenden (gesprächsanalytischen) Beschäftigung mit den standardfernen Varietäten und gesprochensprachlichen Phänomenen erschwert. Daher widmet sich der zweite Teil des Beitrags den bisher erarbeiteten und erprobten Lösungsansätzen ̶ einem stringenten, gesprächsanalytisch fundierten Transkriptionssystem für gesprochenes Arabisch.
The use of digital resources and tools across humanities disciplines is steadily increasing, giving rise to new research paradigms and associated methods that are commonly subsumed under the term digital humanities. Digital humanities does not constitute a new discipline in itself, but rather a new approach to humanities research that cuts across different existing humanities disciplines. While digital humanities extends well beyond language-based research, textual resources and spoken language materials play a central role in most humanities disciplines.
In German oral discourse, previous research has shown that okay can be used both as a response token (e.g., for agreeing with the previous turn or for claiming a certain degree of understanding) and as a discourse marker (e.g., for closing conversational topics or sequences and/or indicating transitions). This contribution focuses on the use of okay as a response token and how it is connected with the speakers’ interactional state of knowledge (their understanding, their assumptions etc.). The analysis is based on video recorded everyday conversations in German and a sequential, micro-analytic approach (multimodal conversation analysis). The main function of conversational okay in the selected data set is related to indicating the acceptance of prior information. By okay, speakers however claim acceptance of a piece of information that they can’t verify or check. The analysis contrasts different sequences containing okay only with sequences in which change-of-state tokens such as ah and achso co-occur with okay. This illustrates that okay itself does not index prior information as new, and that it is not used for agreeing with or for confirming prior information. Instead it enables the speaker to adopt a kind of neutral, “non-agreeing” position towards a given piece of information.