Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Deutsch (2) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (1)
Publisher
- ELRA (1)
- University of Birmingham (1)
Maximizing the potential of very large corpora: 50 years of big language data at IDS Mannheim
(2014)
Very large corpora have been built and used at the IDS since its foundation in 1964. They have been made available on the Internet since the beginning of the 90’s to currently over 30,000 researchers worldwide. The Institute provides the largest archive of written German (Deutsches Referenzkorpus, DeReKe) which has recently been extended to 24 billion words. DeReKe has been managed and analysed by engines known as COSMAS and afterwards COSMAS II, which is currently being replaced by a new, scalable analysis platform called KorAP. KorAP makes it possible to manage and analyse texts that are accompanied by multiple, potentially conflicting, grammatical and structural annotation layers, and is able to handle resources that are distributed across different, and possibly geographically distant, storage systems. The majority of texts in DeReKe are not licensed for free redistribution, hence, the COSMAS and KorAP systems offer technical solutions to facilitate research on very large corpora that are not available (and not suitable) for download. For the new KorAP system, it is also planned to provide sandboxed environments to support non-remote-API access “near the data” through which users can run their own analysis programs.
CoMParS is a resource under construction in the context of the long-term project German Grammar in European Comparison (GDE) at the IDS Mannheim. The principal goal of GDE is to create a novel contrastive grammar of German against the background of other European languages. Alongside German, which is the central focus, the core languages for comparison are English, French, Hungarian and Polish, representing different typological classes. Unlike traditional contrastive grammars available for German, which usually cover language pairs and are based on formal grammatical categories, the new GDE grammar is developed in the spirit of functionalist typology. This implies that, instead of formal criteria, cognitively motivated functional domains in terms of Givón (1984) are used as tertia comparationis. The purpose of CoMParS is to document the empirical basis of the theoretical assumptions of GDE-V and to illustrate the otherwise rather abstract content of grammar books by as many as possible naturally occurring and adequately presented multilingual examples, including information on their use in specific contexts and registers. These examples come from existing parallel corpora, and our presentation will focus on the legal aspects and consequences of this choice of language data.