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One of the fundamental questions about human language is whether all languages are equally complex. Here, we approach this question from an information-theoretic perspective. We present a large scale quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of written language by training a language model on more than 6500 different documents as represented in 41 multilingual text collections consisting of ~ 3.5 billion words or ~ 9.0 billion characters and covering 2069 different languages that are spoken as a native language by more than 90% of the world population. We statistically infer the entropy of each language model as an index of what we call average prediction complexity. We compare complexity rankings across corpora and show that a language that tends to be more complex than another language in one corpus also tends to be more complex in another corpus. In addition, we show that speaker population size predicts entropy. We argue that both results constitute evidence against the equi-complexity hypothesis from an information-theoretic perspective.
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 this paper we present an experimental semantic search function, based on word embeddings, for an integrated online information system on German lexical borrowings into other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWPD). The LWPD synthesizes an increasing number of lexicographical resources and provides basic cross-resource search options. Onomasiological access to the lexical units of the portal is a highly desirable feature for many research questions, such as the likelihood of borrowing lexical units with a given meaning (Haspelmath & Tadmor, 2009; Zeller, 2015). The search technology is based on multilingual pre-trained word embeddings, and individual word senses in the portal are associated with word vectors. Users may select one or more among a very large number of search terms, and the database returns lexical items with word sense vectors similar to these terms. We give a preliminary assessment of the feasibility, usability and efficacy of our approach, in particular in comparison to search options based on semantic domains or fields.
This paper presents a dictionary writing system developed at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (IDS) for an ongoing international lexicographical project that traces the way of German loanwords in the East Slavic languages Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian that were possibly borrowed via Polish. The results will be published in the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWP, lwp.ids-mannheim.de), a web portal for loanword dictionaries with German as the common donor language. The system described here is currently in use for excerpting data from a large range of historical and contemporary East Slavic monolingual dictionaries. The paper focuses on the tools that help in merging excerpts that are etymologically related to one and the same Polish etymon. The merging process involves eliminating redundancies and inconsistencies and, above all, mapping word senses of excerpted entries onto a common cross-language set of ‘metasenses’. This mapping may involve literally hundreds of excerpted East Slavic word senses, including quotations, for one ‘underlying’ Polish etymon.
This paper reports on an ongoing international project of compiling a freely accessible online Dictionary of German Loans in Polish Dialects. The dictionary will be the first comprehensive lexicographic compendium of its kind, serving as a complement to existing resources on German lexical loans in the literary or standard language. The empirical results obtained in the project will shed new light on the distribution of German loanwords among different dialects, also in comparison to the well-documented situation in written Polish. The dictionary will have a strong focus on the dialectal distribution of Polish dialectal variants for a given German etymon, accessible through interactive cartographic representations and corresponding search options. The editorial process is realized with dedicated collaborative web tools. The new resource will be published as an integrated part of an online information system for German lexical borrowings in other languages, the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, and is therefore highly cross-linked with other loanword dictionaries on Polish as well as Slavic and further European languages.
We start by trying to answer a question that has already been asked by de Schryver et al. (2006): Do dictionary users (frequently) look up words that are frequent in a corpus. Contrary to their results, our results that are based on the analysis of log files from two different online dictionaries indicate that users indeed look up frequent words frequently. When combining frequency information from the Mannheim German Reference Corpus and information about the number of visits in the Digital Dictionary of the German Language as well as the German language edition of Wiktionary, a clear connection between corpus and look-up frequencies can be observed. In a follow-up study, we show that another important factor for the look-up frequency of a word is its temporal social relevance. To make this effect visible, we propose a de-trending method where we control both frequency effects and overall look-up trends.
In this paper, the authors use the 2012 log files of two German online dictionaries (Digital Dictionary of the German Language and the German Version of Wiktionary) and the 100,000 most frequent words in the Mannheim German Reference Corpus from 2009 to answer the question of whether dictionary users really do look up frequent words, first asked by de Schryver et al. (2006). By using an approach to the comparison of log files and corpus data which is completely different from that of the aforementioned authors, we provide empirical evidence that indicates - contrary to the results of de Schryver et al. and Verlinde/Binon (2010) - that the corpus frequency of a word can indeed be an important factor in determining what online dictionary users look up. Finally, we incorporate word class Information readily available in Wiktionary into our analysis to improve our results considerably.
Gerd Hentschel gehört zu den Pionieren der heutigen Computerlexikografie und der IT-gestützten Korpuserschließung. Eine seiner ersten Zeitschriftenpublikationen, mit dem Titel Einsatz von EDV und Mikrocomputer in einem lexikographischen Forschungsprojekt zum deutschen Lehnwort im Polnischen (Hentschel 1983), befasst sich mit der Frage, wie - unter den damaligen technischen Vorzeichen - Forschungs- und Dokumentationsarbeiten zu polnischen Germanismen sinnvoll durch die Verwendung von Computern unterstützt werden können. Die besagten Arbeiten mündeten später in die Online-Publikation des Wörterbuchs der deutschen Lehnwörter in der polnischen Schrift- und Standardsprache (WDLP). Es ist aus heutiger Sicht bemerkenswert, mit welchen Beschränkungen die Arbeit mit dem Computer noch vor 40 Jahren zu kämpfen hatte. Aus gegebenem Anlass sei es gestattet, diesen Punkt etwas ausführlicher zu illustrieren.
We present the conceptual foundations and basic features of fLexiCoGraph, a generic software package for creating and presenting curated human-oriented lexicographical resources that are roughly modeled according to Měchura’s (2016) idea of graph-augmented trees. The system is currently under development and will be made accessible as open source software. As a sample use case we discuss an existing online database of loanwords borrowed from German into other languages which is based on a growing number of language-specific loanword dictionaries (Lehnwortportal Deutsch). The paper outlines the conceptual foundations of fLexiCoGraph’s hybrid graph/XML data model. To establish a database, XML-based resources may be imported or even input manually. An additional graph database layer is then constructed from these XML source documents in a freely configurable, but automated way; subsequently, the resulting graph can be manipulated and enlarged through a visual user interface in such a way that keeps the relationship to the source document information explicit at all times. We sketch the tooling support for different kinds of graph-level editing processes, including mechanisms for dealing with updated XML source documents and coping with duplicate or inconsistent information, and briefly discuss the browser interface for end users.