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The project Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch (‘Old German Reference Corpus’) aims to es- tablish a deeply-annotated text corpus of all extant Old German texts. As the automated part-of-speech and morphological pre-annotation is amended by hand, a quality control system for the results seems a desirable objective. To this end, standardized inflectional forms, generated using the morphological information, are compared with the attested word forms. Their creation is described by way of example for the Old High German part of the corpus. As is shown, in a few cases, some features of the attested word forms are also required in order to determine as exactly as possible the shape of the inflected lemma form to be created.
The availability of electronic corpora of historical stages of languages has been wel- comed as possibly attenuating the inherent problem of diachronic linguistics, i.e. that we only have access to what has chanced to come down to us - the problem which was memorably named by Labov (1992) as one of “Bad Data”. However, such corpora can only give us access to an increased amount ot historical material and this can essentially still only be a partial and possibly distorted picture of the actual language at a particular period of history. Corpora can be improved by taking a more representative sample of extant texts if these are available (as they are in significant number for periods after the invention of printing). But, as examples from the recently compiled GerManC corpus of seventeenth and eighteenth century German show, the evidence from such corpora can still fail to yield definitive answers to our questions about earlier stages of a language. The data still require expert interpretation, and it is important to be realistic about what can legitimately be expected from an electronic historical corpus.
Multi-faceted alignment. Toward automatic detection of textual similarity in Gospel-derived texts
(2015)
Ancient Germanic Bible-derived texts stand in as test material for producing computational means for automatically determining where textual contamination and linguistic interference have influenced the translation process. This paper reports on the results of research efforts that produced a text corpus; a method for decomposing the texts involved into smaller, more directly comparable thematically-related chunks; a database of relationships between these chunks; and a user-interface allowing for searches based on various referential criteria. Finally, the state of the product at the end of the project is discussed, namely as it was handed over to another researcher who has extended it to automatically find semantic and syntactic similarities within comparable chunks.
In this paper we present some preliminary considerations concerning the possibility of automatic parsing an annotated corpus for N-N compounds. This should in prin- ciple be possible at least for relational and stereotype compounds, if the lemmatization of the corpus connects the lemmata with lexical entries as described in Höhle (1982). These lexical entries then supply the necessary information about the argument structure of a relational noun or about the stereotypical purpose associated with the noun’s referent which can be used to establish a relation between the first and the head constituent of the compound.
The relative order of dative and accusative objects in older German is less free than it is today. The reason for this could be that speakers of the direct predecessor of Old High German organized the referents according to the Thematic Hierarchy. If one applies a Case Hierarchy Nom>Acc>Dat to this, the order Nom - Dat - Acc falls out. It becomes apparent that the status of the Thematic Hierarchy is not a factor governing underlying word order, but a factor inducing scrambling. Arguments from binding theory, whose validity is discussed, indicate that the underlying order is ‘accusative before dative’
This study explores the interdependence of qualitative and quantitative analysis in articulating empirically plausible and theoretically coherent generalizations about grammatical structure. I will show that the use of large electronic corpora is indispensable to the grammarian's work, serving as a rich source of semantic and contextual information, which turns out to be crucial in categorizing and explaining grammatical forms. These general concerns are illustrated by the patterns of use of Czech relative clauses (RC) with the non-declinable relativizer co, by taking a set of existing claims about these RCs and testing their accuracy on corpus material. The relevant analytic categories revolve around the referential type of the relativized noun, the interaction between relativization and deixis, and the semantic relationship between the relativized noun and the proposition expressed by the RC. The analysis demonstrates that some of the existing claims are fully invalid in the face of regularly attested semantic distinctions, while others are more or less on the right track but often not comprehensive or precise enough to capture the full richness of the facts. 1
Conversation is usually considered to be grammatically simple, while academic writing is often claimed to be structurally complex, associated primarily with a greater use of dependent clauses. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on the results of large-scale corpus investigations. We argue that both conversation and professional academic writing are grammatically complex but that their complexities are dramatically different. Surprisingly, the traditional view that complexity is realized through extensive clausal embedding leads to the conclusion that conversation is more complex than academic writing. In contrast, written academic discourse is actually much more ‘compressed’ than elaborated, and the complexities of academic writing are realized mostly as phrasal embedding rather than embedded clauses.
From Proof Texts to Logic. Discourse Representation Structures for Proof Texts in Mathematics
(2009)
We present an extension to Discourse Representation Theory that can be used to analyze mathematical texts written in the commonly used semi-formal language of mathematics (or at least a subset of it). Moreover, we describe an algorithm that can be used to check the resulting Proof Representation Structures for their logical validity and adequacy as a proof.
The main objective of this article is to describe the current activities at the Mannheim Institute for German Language regarding the implementation of a domain-specific ontology for German grammar. We differentiate ontology bases from ontology management Systems, point out the benefits of database-driven Solutions, and go Step by Step through all phases of the ontology lifecycle. In Order to demonstrate the practical use of our approach, we outline the interface between our ontology and the grammis web Information System, and compare the ontology-based retrieval mechanism with traditional full text search.
Investigating the history of a language depends on fragmentary sources, but electronic corpora offer the possibility of alleviating the problem of ‘bad data’. However they cannot overcome it totally, and crucial questions thus arise of the optimal architecture for such a corpus, the problem of how representative even a large corpus can be of actual language use at a particular time, and how a historical corpus can best be annotated and provided with tools to maximize its usefulness as a resource for future researchers. Immense strides have been made in recent years in addressing these questions, with exciting new methods and technological advances. The papers in this volume, which were presented at a conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora (Manchester 2011), exemplify the range of these developments in investigating the diachrony of languages as distinct as English, German, Latin, Spanish, French and Slovene and developing appropriate tools for the analysis of historical corpora in these languages.
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 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.