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An ongoing academic and research program, the “Vocabula Grammatica” lexicon, implemented by the Centre for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki, Greece), aims at lemmatizing all the philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and metrical terms in the written texts of scholars (philologists and scholiasts) who curated the ancient Greek literature from the beginning of the Hellenistic period (4th/3rd c. BC) until the end of the Byzantine era (15th c. AD). In particular, it aspires to fill serious gaps (a) in the study of ancient Greek scholarship and (b) in the lexicography of the ancient Greek language and literature. By providing specific examples, we will highlight the typical and methodological features of the forthcoming dictionary.
Drawing upon the transformative power of questions, the paper investigates questioning sequences from authentic coaching data to examine the systematic use of a particular succession of formulation and question and its impact on inviting self-reflection processes in the client and eliciting change. The object of investigation in this paper are therefore questioning sequences in which a coach asks a question immediately after a rephrasing or relocating action, prompting the client to respond in an explicit or implicit way. The coach hereby shifts the focus to a hypothetical scenario, prompting the client to change her perspective on the matter and reflect on her own statements, ideas and attitudes from an outside perspective. The paper aims to contribute to closing the research gap of the change potential of reflection-stimulating action techniques used by coaches, by investigating one of many ways of how questions can be powerful tools to invite a change of perspective for the client. The study focuses on one coaching process consisting of three sessions between a female coach and a female client, utilizing a single case study approach. The data collection was part of the interdisciplinary project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching”, comprising 14 authentic coaching processes. The analysis follows Peräkylä’s Transformative Sequences model, examining the first position including the formulation and the subsequent question, the client’s response, and the coach’s reaction to the response. On a practical level, the main purpose of this paper is not to contribute to the many ways practical literature recommends coaches how to do their work and how to ask questions, but rather to show in what ways the elicitation of self-reflection processes in clients has been achieved by other coaches in authentic coaching sessions.
“My Curiosity was Satisfied, but not in a Good Way”: Predicting User Ratings for Online Recipes
(2014)
In this paper, we develop an approach to automatically predict user ratings for recipes at Epicurious.com, based on the recipes’ reviews. We investigate two distributional methods for feature selection, Information Gain and Bi-Normal Separation; we also compare distributionally selected features to linguistically motivated features and two types of frameworks: a one-layer system where we aggregate all reviews and predict the rating vs. a two-layer system where ratings of individual reviews are predicted and then aggregated. We obtain our best results by using the two-layer architecture, in combination with 5 000 features selected by Information Gain. This setup reaches an overall accuracy of 65.60%, given an upper bound of 82.57%.
Verbs may be attributed to higher agency than other grammatical categories. In Study 1, we confirmed this hypothesis with archival datasets comprising verbs (N = 950) and adjectives (N = 2115). We then investigated whether verbs (vs. adjectives) increase message effectiveness. In three experiments presenting potential NGOs (Studies 2 and 3) or corporate campaigns (Study 4) in verb or adjective form, we demonstrate the hypothesized relationship. Across studies, (overall N = 721) grammatical agency consistently increased message effectiveness. Semantic agency varied across contexts by either increasing (Study 2), not affecting (Study 3), or decreasing (Study 4) the effectiveness of the message. Overall, experiments provide insights in to the meta-semantic effects of verbs – demonstrating how grammar may influence communication outcomes.
The proposed contribution will shed light on current and future challenges on legal and ethical questions in research data infrastructures. The authors of the proposal will present the work of NFDI’s section on Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (hereinafter: ELSA), whose aim is to facilitate cross-disciplinary cooperation between the NFDI consortia in the relevant areas of management and re-use of research data.
Having found their way onto the computer screens, comics soon branched into webcomics. These kept a lot of the characteristics of print comic books, but gradually adapted new unexplored modes of representation. Three relatively new ‘enhancements’ to the medium of comics are presented in this article: webcomics enhanced through the use of the infinite canvas, as proposed by Scott McCloud, those enhanced with videos and/or sound, and lastly those enhanced with interactive and ludic elements. All of the mentioned push the medium of comics into new waters, and by doing so they add new layers of meaning and modify their structure based on the make-up of the implemented features. Infinite canvas manages to lift some limitations of print comics without changing the overall feel too drastically, while animated and voiced webcomics, as well as interactive or game comics, have a much higher inclination to transgress into domains of other media and transform themselves in order to accommodate and integrate these novel foreign features.
“Die Sprach-Checker” (Eng. “Language Checkers”) are young citizen scientists from Mannheim’s highly diverse district Neckarstadt-West. Together with linguists, they investigate a tremendous treasure: their own multilingualism. They are exploring and (re)discovering their own languages and the other languages used in their environment while documenting and reflecting on their everyday experiences in and with different linguistic practices. Our aim is to raise awareness of their strengths and to promote appreciation for their language biographies, thus fostering a sense of identification with one’s own linguistic surroundings. Such a joint research endeavour offers empirical opportunities to address (linguistic) issues of societal relevance by collecting authentic data from the multicultural district and involving its residents and local stakeholders. In this paper, we will provide insights regarding the project’s background, conception, and outcomes. We address everyone who is planning or conducting a citizen science project with young people, especially children and adolescents, or who works at the interface between science and society.
‘Can’ and ‘must’-type modal verbs in the direct sanctioning of misconduct across European languages
(2023)
Deontic meanings of obligation and permissibility have mostly been studied in relation to modal verbs, even though researchers are aware that such meanings can be conveyed in other ways (consider, for example, the contributions to Nuyts/van der Auwera (eds.) 2016). This presentation reports on an ongoing project that examines deontic meaning but takes as its starting point not a type of linguistic structure but a particular kind of social moment that presumably attracts deontic talk: The management of potentially ‚unacceptable‘ or untoward actions (taking the last bread roll at breakfast, making a disallowed move during a board game, etc.). Data come from a multi-language parallel video corpus of everyday social interaction in English, German, Italian, and Polish. Here, we focus on moments in which one person sanctions another’s behavior as unacceptable. Using interactional-linguistic methods (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018), we examine similarities and differences across these four languages in the use of modal verbs as part of such sanctioning attempts. First results suggest that modal verbs are not as common in the sanctioning of misconduct as one might expect. Across the four languages, only between 10%–20% of relevant sequences involve a modal verb. Most of the time, in this context, speakers achieve deontic meaning in other ways (e.g., infinitives such as German nicht so schmatzen, ‚no smacking‘). This raises the question what exactly modal verbs, on those relatively rare occasions when they are used, contribute to the accomplishment of deontic meaning. The reported study pursues this question in two ways: 1) By considering similarities across languages in the ways that modal verbs interact with other (verbal) means in the sanctioning of misconduct.; 2) By considering differences across languages in the use of modal verbs. Here, we find that the relevant modal verbs are used similarly in some activity contexts (enforcing rules during board games), but less so in other activity contexts (mundane situations with no codified rules). In sum, the presented study adds to cross-linguistically grounded knowledge about deontic meaning and its relationships to linguistics structures.
Αυοιγμα / Opening
(2011)
Despite the importance of the agent role for language grammar and processing, its definition and features are still controversially discussed in the literature on semantic roles. Moreover, diagnostic tests to dissociate agentive from non-agentive roles are typically applied with qualitative introspection data. We investigated whether quantitative acceptability ratings obtained with a well-established agentivity test, the DO-cleft, provide evidence for the feature-based prototype account of (Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic protoroles and argument selction. Language 67(3). 547-619) postulating that agentivity increases with the number of agentive features that a role subsumes. We used four different intransitive verb classes in German and collected acceptability judgements from non-expert native speakers of German. Our results show that sentence acceptability increases linearly with the number of agentive features and, hence, agentivity. Moreover, our findings confirm that sentience belongs to the group of proto-agent features. In summary, this suggests that a multidimensional account including a specific mechanism for role prototypicality (feature accumulation) successfully captures gradient acceptability clines. Quantitative acceptability estimates are a meaningful addition to linguistic theorizing.
The IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) software currently uses a simple tabular data model with proven limitations. We outline and justify the need for a new data model to underlie the next major version of CWB. This data model, dubbed Ziggurat, defines a series of types of data layer to represent different structures and relations within an annotated corpus; each such layer may contain variables of different types. Ziggurat will allow us to gradually extend and enhance CWB’s existing CQP-syntax for corpus queries, and also make possible more radical departures relative not only to the current version of CWB but also to other contemporary corpus-analysis software.
This paper presents an annotation scheme for English modal verbs together with sense-annotated data from the news domain. We describe our annotation scheme and discuss problematic cases for modality annotation based on the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic sense tagging, showing that our annotations do provide a valuable training resource for NLP systems.
In this paper we outline our corpus-driven approach to detecting, describing and presenting multi- word expressions (MWEs). Our goal is to treat MWEs in a way that gives credit to their flexible nature and their role in language use. The bases of our research are a very large corpus and a Statistical method of collocation analysis. The rich empirical data is interpreted linguistically in a structured way which captures the interrelations, patterns and types of variances of MWEs. Several levels of abstraction build on each other: surface patterns, lexical realizations (LRs), MWEs and MWE patterns. Generalizations are made in a controlled way and in adherence to corpus evidence. The results are published online in a hypertext format.
Wortgeschichte digital (‘digital word history’) is a new historical dictionary of New High German, the most recent period of German reaching from approximately 1600 AD up to the present. By contrast to many historical dictionaries, Wortgeschichte digital has a narrated text – a “word history” – at the core of its entries. The motivation for choosing this format rather than traditional microstructures is
briefly outlined. Special emphasis it put on the way these word histories interact with other components of the dictionary, notably with the quotation section. As Wortgeschichte digital is an online only project, visualizations play an important role for the design of the dictionary. Two examples are presented: first, the “quotation navigator” which is relevant for the microstructure of the entries, and, second, a timeline (“Zeitstrahl”) which is part of the macrostructure as it gives access to the lemma inventory from a diachronic point of view.
The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years.
Sound units play a pivotal role in cognitive models of auditory comprehension. The general consensus is that during perception listeners break down speech into auditory words and subsequently phones. Indeed, cognitive speech recognition is typically taken to be computationally intractable without phones. Here we present a computational model trained on 20 hours of conversational speech that recognizes word meanings within the range of human performance (model 25%, native speakers 20–44%), without making use of phone or word form representations. Our model also generates successfully predictions about the speed and accuracy of human auditory comprehension. At the heart of the model is a ‘wide’ yet sparse two-layer artificial neural network with some hundred thousand input units representing summaries of changes in acoustic frequency bands, and proxies for lexical meanings as output units. We believe that our model holds promise for resolving longstanding theoretical problems surrounding the notion of the phone in linguistic theory.
We describe a simple procedure for the automatic creation of word-level alignments between printed documents and their respective full-text versions. The procedure is unsupervised, uses standard, off-the-shelf components only, and reaches an F-score of 85.01 in the basic setup and up to 86.63 when using pre- and post-processing. Potential areas of application are manual database curation (incl. document triage) and biomedical expression OCR.
This paper will address the challenge of creating a knowledge graph from a corpus of historical encyclopedias with a special focus on word sense alignment (WSA) and disambiguation (WSD). More precisely, we examine WSA and WSD approaches based on article similarity to link messy historical data, utilizing Wikipedia as aground-truth component – as the lack of a critical overlap in content paired with the amount of variation between and within the encyclopedias does not allow for choosing a ”baseline” encyclopedia to align the others to. Additionally, we are comparing the disambiguation performance of conservative methods like the Lesk algorithm to more recent approaches, i.e. using language models to disambiguate senses.
This article explores the relation between word order and response latency, focusing on responses to question-word questions. Qualitative (multimodal) and quantitative analyses of naturally occurring conversations in French—where question-words can occur in initial, medial, or final position within the question—show that variation in word order affects the timing of responses. It is argued that this is so because word order provides a differential basis for action ascription, creating different temporal opportunities for projecting the recipient’s next relevant action. The frequent occurrence of early responses to questions with an initial question-word, in particular, stresses the importance of the recognition point of an action under way for response timing and shows respondents’ pervasive orientation to sequential progressivity. Findings highlight how lexico-syntactic trajectories of emergent turns, prior talk and actions, material and bodily features of interaction, and participants’ shared expectations conspire in shaping the time-courses of action ascription and action projection.
Word Families in Diachrony. An epoch-spanning structure for the word families of older German
(2022)
The ‘Word Families in Diachrony’ project (WoDia), for which a funding application to the DFG is in preparation, aims to provide a database driven online research environment that will enable processes of change in the entire historical vocabulary of German to be investigated by focusing on the changes in word families and the individual means of word formation. WoDia will embed the vocabularies of Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG), Old Saxon (OS), and Middle Low German (MLG) in a database, resulting in a word-family structure for High and Low German from the beginnings up to the 15th century (for High German) and up to the 17th century (for Low German). The basis of the vocabulary is provided by reference dictionaries of the four historical varieties, whereas the word families’ historical structure is based on the word-family dictionary of OHG by Jochen Splett (1992). Each lemma in the database will be assigned, where appropriate, to a word family. The individual word-formation elements and the word-formation hierarchy will be mapped in a structural formula. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different periods/varieties of older German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations of word families in the database (e. g., relating to word structure) will be supplemented by linking their lemmas to the online dictionaries and to the reference corpora of Old German (OS and OHG), MHG, and MLG.
Many European languages have undergone considerable changes in orthography over the last 150 years. This hampers the application of modern computer-based analysers to older text, and hence computer-based annotation and studies of text collections spanning a long period. As a step towards a functional analyser for Norwegian texts (Nynorsk standard) from the 19th century, funding was granted in 2020 for creating a full form generator for all inflected forms of headwords found in Ivar Aasen’s dictionary published in 1873 (Aasen 1873) and his grammar from 1864 (Aasen 1864). Creating this word bank led to new insight in Aasen (1873), its structure, internal organisation, and ambition level as well as its link to Aasen (1864). As a test, the full form list generated from this new word bank was used to analyse the word inventory of texts by Aa. O. Vinje, written in the period 1850–1870. The Vinje texts were also analysed using a full form list of modern standard Norwegian, to study the differences in applicability and see how Vinje’s language relates to the written standard of modern Norwegian.
eThis paper first attempts a state-of-the art overview of what is known about women in the history of lexicography up to the early twentieth century. It then focusses more closely on the German and German-English lexicographical traditions to 1900, examining them from three different perspectives (following Russell’s 2018 study of women in English lexicography): women as users and dedicatees of dictionaries; women as contributors to and compilers of lexicographical works; and (in a very preliminary way) women and female sexuality as represented in German/English bilingual dictionaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russell (2018) was able to identify some 24 dictionaries invoking women as patrons, dedicatees or potential users before 1700, and some 150 works in English lexicography by women between 1500 and 1900, besides the contribution of hundreds of women as supporters and helpers, not least as unpaid readers and sub-editors for the Oxford English Dictionary. Equivalent research in other languages is lacking, but this paper presents some of the known examples of women as lexicographers. The evidence tends to support Russell’s finding for English, that women were more likely to find a place in lexicography outside the mainstream: sometimes in a more private sphere (like Hester Piozzi); often in bilingual lexicography (such as Margrethe Thiele, working on a Danish-French dictionary), including missionary and or colonizing activity (such as Cinie Louw in Africa, Daisy Bates in Australia); and in dialect description (Coronedi Berti in Italy, Luisa Lacal and María Moliner in Spain). Within the German-speaking context, women who participated in lexicographical work themselves are hard to identify before the late nineteenth century, though those few women who did have access to education were often engaged in language learning, including translation activity, and they were likely users of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Christian Ludwig’s (1706) English-German dictionary – the first of its kind – was dedicated to the Electoral Princess Sophia of Hanover. Elizabeth Weir may have been the first named female compiler of a German dictionary, with her bilingual New German Dictionary (1888). Rather better known are the cases of Agathe Lasch and Luise Pusch, who, as pioneering women in the field of German linguistics, ultimately led major lexicographical projects documenting German regional varieties in the first half of the twentieth century (Middle Low German and Hamburgish in the case of Lasch; the Hessisch Nassau dialect dictionary in the case of Berthold). In the light of existing research on gender and sexuality in the history of English lexicography (e. g. Iamartino 2010; Turton 2019), I conclude with a preliminary exploration how woman and sexuality have been represented in dictionaries of German and English, taking the words Hure and woman in bilingual German-English dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as my case studies.
From June 26th to July 2nd 2023 the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA) took place in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia – after a long pause due to the Covid-pandemic and for the first time in the southern hemisphere. About 350 participants from about 50 different countries attended the conference. This year’s ICCA came up with 36 panels and about 300 papers that were presented. Four plenary speakers have been invited and 24 pre-conference workshops took place. On Wednesday evening Ilana Mushin, in her role as conference chair, officially opened ICCA. The President of the International Society of Conversation Analysis (ISCA), Tanya Stivers, also welcomed all participants. To get acquainted with the indigenous culture of Queensland, the opening ceremony was enriched with a highly impressive dance performance by First Nations people. After the official inauguration the international community met at the Welcome Reception to look forward together to the days ahead with many opportunities for exchange and networking.
As it will become clear throughout this report, the research topics revolved around not only classic CA concepts, but also importantly concerned embodiment, which continued the line of past conferences (Dix 2019). Another aspect that has been highlighted was conflict and social norms. Due to personal capacities, we can only present a selection of presentations within the scope of this conference report. The selection was influenced by the personal interest of the authors and should not be understood as rating in any sense.
Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: I will focus on one crucial step in von Glasersfeld’s argumentation, viz. his view that every individual constructs his own private meanings (understood as conceptual structures or elements thereof) for linguistic expressions, so that linguistic interaction and even communication in general is based on a notion of compatibility between different speakers’ private conceptual schemes. The central question here is: “Just what does it mean that different private conceptual schemes (private meanings) are compatible, or what constitutes a viable criterion to this end?” As von Glasersfeld himself stresses twice (§28, §37), the criteria to be looked for can only be “public,” residing in properties of verbal and non-verbal actions of the interacting individuals, properties that can be sensed and processed by the participating system.
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on treebank annotation schemes and their impact on PCFG parsing results. We provide a thorough comparison of two German treebanks: the TIGER treebank and the TüBa-D/Z. We use simple statistics on sentence length and vocabulary size, and more refined methods such as perplexity and its correlation with PCFG parsing results, as well as a Principal Components Analysis. Finally we present a qualitative evaluation of a set of 100 sentences from the TüBa- D/Z, manually annotated in the TIGER as well as in the TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme, and show that even the existence of a parallel subcorpus does not support a straightforward and easy comparison of both annotation schemes.
This paper presents a compositional annotation scheme to capture the clusivity properties of personal pronouns in context, that is their ability to construct and manage in-groups and out-groups by including/excluding the audience and/or non-speech act participants in reference to groups that also include the speaker. We apply and test our schema on pronoun instances in speeches taken from the German parliament. The speeches cover a time period from 2017-2021 and comprise manual annotations for 3,126 sentences. We achieve high inter-annotator agreement for our new schema, with a Cohen’s κ in the range of 89.7-93.2 and a percentage agreement of > 96%. Our exploratory analysis of in/exclusive pronoun use in the parliamentary setting provides some face validity for our new schema. Finally, we present baseline experiments for automatically predicting clusivity in political debates, with promising results for many referential constellations, yielding an overall 84.9% micro F1 for all pronouns.
Who is we? Disambiguating the referents of first person plural pronouns in parliamentary debates
(2021)
This paper investigates the use of first person plural pronouns as a rhetorical device in political speeches. We present an annotation schema for disambiguating pronoun references and use our schema to create an annotated corpus of debates from the German Bundestag. We then use our corpus to learn to automatically resolve pronoun referents in parliamentary debates. We explore the use of data augmentation with weak supervision to further expand our corpus and report preliminary results.
This White Paper sets out commonly agreed definitions on activities of consortia within NFDI. It aims to provide a common basis for reporting and reference regarding selected questions of cross-consortial relevance in DFG’s template for the Interim Reports. The questions were prioritised by an NFDI Task Force on Evaluation and Reporting (formerly Task Force Monitoring) as a result of discussing possible answers to the DFG template. In this process the need to agree on a generalizable meaning of terms commonly used in the context of NFDI, and reporting in particular, were identified from cross-consortial perspectives. Questions that showed the highest requirement on clarification are discussed in this White Paper. As NFDI evolves, the Task Force will likely propose further joint approaches for reporting in information infrastructures.
While each of broad relevance, the questions addressed relate to substantially different aspects of consortia’s work. They are thus also structured slightly different.
It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at the constructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.
Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action that is addressed by the turn before the recipient’s response. We argue that through such embodied conduct, the speaker bodily enacts high agency, which is at odds with the low deontic stance they express through their darf/kann ich?-TCUs. In doing so, speakers presuppose that the intersubjective permissibility of the action is highly probable or even certain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the speaker’s embodied action, joint perceptual salience of referents, and the projectability of the action addressed with darf/kann ich? allow for a lean syntactic design of darf/kann ich?-TCUs (i.e., pronominalization, object omission, and main verb omission). Our findings underscore the reflexive relationship between lean syntax, sequential organization and multimodal conduct.
N-grams are of utmost importance for modern linguistics and language theory. The legal status of n-grams, however, raises many practical questions. Traditionally, text snippets are considered copyrightable if they meet the originality criterion, but no clear indicators as to the minimum length of original snippets exist; moreover, the solutions adopted in some EU Member States (the paper cites German and French law as examples) are considerably different. Furthermore, recent developments in EU law (the CJEU's Pelham decision and the new right of newspaper publishers) also provide interesting arguments in this debate. The proposed paper presents the existing approaches to the legal protection of n-grams and tries to formulate some clear guidelines as to the length of n-grams that can be freely used and shared.
N-grams are of utmost importance for modern linguistics and language technology. The legal status of n-grams, however, raises many practical questions. Traditionally, text snippets are considered copyrightable if they meet the originality criterion, but no clear indicators as to the minimum length of original snippets exist; moreover, the solutions adopted in some EU Member States (the paper cites German and French law as examples) are considerably different. Furthermore, recent developments in EU law (the CJEU's Pelham decision and the new right of press publishers) also provide interesting arguments in this debate. The paper presents the existing approaches to the legal protection of n-grams and tries to formulate some clear guidelines as to the length of n-grams that can be freely used and shared.
Recipient design is a key constituent of intersubjectivity in interaction. Recipient design of turns is informed by prior knowledge about and shared experience with recipients. Designing turns in order to be maximally effective for the particular recipient(s) is crucial for accomplishing intersubjectively coordinated action. This paper reports on a specific pragmatic structure of recipient design, i.e. counter-factual recipient design, and how it impinges on intersubjectivity in interaction. Based on an analysis of video-recordings data from driving school lessons in German, two kinds of counterfactual recipient design of instructors' requests are distinguished: pedagogic and egocentric turn-design. Counterfactual, pedagogic turn-design is used strategically to diagnose student skills and to create opportunities for corrective instructions. Egocentric turn-design rests on private, non-shared knowledge of the instructor. Egocentrically designed turns imply expectations of how to comply with requests which cannot be recovered by the student and which lead to a breakdown of intersubjective cooperation. This paper identifies practices, sources and interactional consequences of these two kinds of counterfactual recipient design. In addition, the study enhances our understanding of recipient design in at least three ways. It shows that recipient design does not only concern referential and descriptive practices, but also the indexing intelligible projections of next actions; it highlights the productive, other-positioning effects of recipient design; it argues that recipient design should be analyzed in terms of temporally extended interactional trajectories, linking turn-constructional practices to interactional histories and consecutive trajectories of joint action.
When appearance does not match accent: neural correlates of ethnicity-related expectancy violations
(2017)
Most research on ethnicity in neuroscience and social psychology has focused on visual cues. However, accents are central social markers of ethnicity and strongly influence evaluations of others. Here, we examine how varying auditory (vocal accent) and visual (facial appearance) information about others affects neural correlates of ethnicity-related expectancy violations. Participants listened to standard German and Turkish-accented speakers and were subsequently presented with faces whose ethnic appearance was either congruent or incongruent to these voices. We expected that incongruent targets (e.g. German accent/Turkish face) would be paralleled by a more negative N2 event-related brain potential (ERP) component. Results confirmed this, suggesting that incongruence was related to more effortful processing of both Turkish and German target faces. These targets were also subjectively judged as surprising. Additionally, varying lateralization of ERP responses for Turkish and German faces suggests that the underlying neural generators differ, potentially reflecting different emotional reactions to these targets. Behavioral responses showed an effect of violated expectations: German-accented Turkish-looking targets were evaluated as most competent of all targets. We suggest that bringing together neural and behavioral measures of expectancy violations, and using both visual and auditory information, yields a more complete picture of the processes underlying impression formation.
The following analysis explores the nature of everyday activities of people in economic leadership positions. It inquires as to the institutions and people they are in contact with, and the way they communicate with them. First, I will present existing studies in this field and the ethnographic procedure of this study. I will then describe the communicative activities of high-level personnel and their communication networks based on observations. These are then linked to their communicative tasks and types of interaction. Finally, I will discuss some characteristics of the communicative style.
This paper reports on the latest developments of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo and the German Reference Corpus in relation to three of the most important CMLC topics: interoperability, collaboration on corpus infrastructure building, and legal issues. Concerning interoperability, we present new ways to access DeReKo via KorAP on the API and on the plugin level. In addition we report about advancements in the EuReCo- and ICC-initiatives with the provision of comparable corpora, and about recent problems with license acquisitions and our solution approaches using an indemnification clause and model licenses that include scientific exploitation.
Having the necessary skills for staying in contact with friends and relatives through digital devices is crucial in today’s world. As the current COVID-19 pandemic shows, this holds especially true for the elderly. Being quarantined and restricted from physically meeting people, various communication technologies are more important than ever for staying social and informed on current events. In nursing homes, staff members are now finding new ways for staying in touch with family members by assisting residents in making video calls with mobile devices.
But what if elderly people cannot rely on personal assistance for accessing these alternative means of communication? This raises the general question of how older people can and do learn to use such technologies. Although the internet is full of guides and instructional videos on how to use smartphones or tablets, they are a cold comfort to someone who may not even know what an internet browser is.
Especially for digital newcomers, the tried and true method of face-to-face instruction is invaluable. While many older people turn to their children or grandchildren for help in all things digital, courses specifically tailored for elderly users are also increasingly popular.
More and more governmental initiatives and associations indeed acknowledge the already existing interest of elderly citizens in digital tools and their growing need to receive customized training (e.g. “SeniorSurf” and “Kansalaisen digitaidot” in Finland or “Silver Tipps” in Germany). For a researcher of social interaction, these courses can also provide a valuable window for discovering what it looks and sounds like to learn to use essential but sometimes alien technologies.
This study investigates other-initiated repair and its embodied dimension in casual English as lingua franca (ELF) conversations, thereby contributing to the further understanding of multimodal repair practices in social interaction. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we focus on two types of restricted other-initiation of repair (OIR): partial repeats preceded or followed by the question word what (i.e., what X?/X what?) and copular interrogative clauses (i.e., what is X). Partial repeats with what produced with rising final intonation are consistently accompanied by a head poke and treated as relating to troubles in hearing, with the repair usually consisting of a repeat. In contrast to these partial repeats, copular interrogative clauses are produced with downward final intonation and accompanied by face-related embodied conduct. The what is X OIRs primarily target code-switched lexical items, the understanding of which is critical for maintaining the repair initiator’s involvement in the ongoing sequence. This study also contributes some general reflections on the possible complexity of OIR and repair practices from a multimodal perspective.
We report results from an exploratory study of college students’ conceptions of poetry in which we asked them to name three things they expect from a poem. Frequency- and list-based analyses of their responses revealed that they primarily expect poems to rhyme, but they also identified a number of form-, content-, and reception-related genre expectations, which we discuss in relation to relevant previous research. We propose that rhyme’s predominance in college students’ genre expectations reflects its perceptual and cognitive salience during incremental poetry comprehension rather than its frequency in contemporary poetic practice. Our results characterize the genre conceptions of the population that empirical studies of poetry comprehension typically investigate, and thus provide relevant background information for the interpretation of empirical
findings in this field.
This study aims to establish what lexical factors make it more likely for dictionary users to consult specific articles in a dictionary using the English Wiktionary log files, which include records of user visits over the course of 6 years. Recent findings suggest that lexical frequency is a significant factor predicting look-up behavior, with the more frequent words being more likely to be consulted. Three further lexical factors are brought into focus: (1) age of acquisition; (2) lexical prevalence; and (3) degree of polysemy operationalized as the number of dictionary senses. Age of acquisition and lexical prevalence data were obtained from recent published studies and linked to the list of visited Wiktionary lemmas, whereas polysemy status was derived from Wiktionary entries themselves. Regression modeling confirms the significance of corpus frequency in explaining user interest in looking up words in the dictionary. However, the remaining three factors also make a contribution whose nature is discussed and interpreted. Knowing what makes dictionary users look up words is both theoretically interesting and practically useful to lexicographers, telling them which lexical items should be prioritized in lexicographic work.
What is a sentient agent?
(2018)
We propose a new type of subword embedding designed to provide more information about unknown compounds, a major source for OOV words in German. We present an extrinsic evaluation where we use the compound embeddings as input to a neural dependency parser and compare the results to the ones obtained with other types of embeddings. Our evaluation shows that adding compound embeddings yields a significant improvement of 2% LAS over using word embeddings when no POS information is available. When adding POS embeddings to the input, however, the effect levels out. This suggests that it is not the missing information about the semantics of the unknown words that causes problems for parsing German, but the lack of morphological information for unknown words. To augment our evaluation, we also test the new embeddings in a language modelling task that requires both syntactic and semantic information.
In this paper, we present WebAnno-MM, an extension of the popular web-based annotation tool WebAnno, which is designed for the linguistic annotation of transcribed spoken data with time aligned media files. Several new features have been implemented for our current use case: a novel teaching method based on pair-wise manual annotation of transcribed video data and systematic comparison of agreement between students. To enable the annotation of transcribed spoken language data, apart from technical and data model related challenges, WebAnno-MM offers an additional view to data: a (musical) score view for the inspection of parallel utterances, which is relevant for various methodological research questions regarding the analysis of interactions of spoken content.
We present ESDexplorer (https://owid.shinyapps.io/ESDexplorer), a browser application which allows the user to explore the data from a large European survey on dictionary use and culture. We built ESDexplorer with several target groups in mind: our cooperation partners, other researchers, and a more general public interested in the results. Also, we present in detail the architecture and technological realisation of the application and discuss some legal aspects of data protection that motivated some architectural choices.
Complex linguistic phenomena, such as Clitic Climbing in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, are often described intuitively, only from the perspective of the main tendency. In this paper, we argue that web corpora currently offer the best source of empirical material for studying Clitic Climbing in BCS. They thus allow the most accurate description of this phenomenon, as less frequent constructions can be tracked only in big, well-annotated data sources. We compare the properties of web corpora for BCS with traditional sources and give examples of studies on CC based on web corpora. Furthermore, we discuss problems related to web corpora and suggest some improvements for the future.
Ways out of the dictionary: hyperlinks to other sources in German and African online dictionaries
(2023)
This study examines a number of German and African online dictionaries to see how they make use of the possibility of linking to external sources (e.g. other dictionaries, encyclopaedias, or even corpus data). The article investigates which hyperlinks occur at which places in the word articles and how these are presented to the dictionary users. This is done against the background of metalexicographic considerations on the planning of outer features and the mediostructure in online dictionaries as well as different categorizations of hyperlinks in online reference works. The results show that retro-digitized dictionaries make virtually no use of hyperlinks to external sources. Genuine online dictionaries, on the other hand, do, but often in a form that needs improvement, since, for example, explanations of dictionary-external links are not always found in the user guide and their design is different even within a dictionary.
Words and their usages are in many cases closely related to or embedded in social, cultural, technical and ideological contexts. This does not only apply to individual words and specific senses, but to many vocabulary zones as well. Moreover, the development of words is often related to aspects of socio-cultural evolution in a broad sense. In this paper I will have a look at traditional dictionaries and digital lexical systems focussing on the question how they deal with socio-cultural and discourse-related aspects of word usage. I will also propose a number of suggestions how future digital lexical systems might be enriched in this respect.
In this paper, general problems with easily confused words among a language community are addressed. Serving as an example, the difficulties of semantic differentiation between the use of German sensibel and sensitiv are discussed. One the one hand, the question is raised as to how a speech community faces challenges of semantic shifts and how monolingual dictionaries document lexical items with similar semantic aspects. On the other hand, I will demonstrate the discrepancies of information on meaning as retrieved and interpreted from large corpus data. It will be shown how the semantics of words change and hence cause confusion among speakers. As a result, empirical evidence opens up several questions concerning the prescriptive vs. descriptive treatment of paronymic items such as sensibel/sensitiv and it demands different approaches to the lexicographic description of such words in future reference works.
The German e-dictionary documenting confusables Paronyme – Dynamisch im Kontrast contains lexemes which are similar in sound, spelling and/or meaning, e.g. autoritär/autoritativ, innovativ/innovatorisch. These can cause uncertainty as to their appropriate use. The monolingual guide could be easily expanded to become a multilingual platform for commonly confused items by incorporating language modules. The value of this visionary resource is manifold. Firstly, e-dictionaries of confusables have not yet been compiled for most European languages; consequently, the German resource could serve as a model of practice. Secondly, it would be able to explain the usage of false friends. Thirdly, cognates and loan word equivalents would be offered for simultaneous consultation. Fourthly, users could find out whether, for example, a German pair is semantically equivalent to a pair in another language. Finally, it would inform users about cases where a pair of semantically similar words in one language has only one lexical counterpart in another language. This paper is an appeal for visionary projects and collaborative enterprises. I will outline the dictionary’s layout and contents as shown by its contrastive entries. I will demonstrate potential additions, which would make it possible to build up a large platform for easily misused words in different languages.
There is increasing interest in recognizing opinion inferences in addition to expressions of explicit sentiment. While different formalisms for representing inferential mechanisms are being developed and lexical resources are being built alongside, we here address the need for deeper investigation of the robustness of various aspects of opinion inference, performing crowdsourcing experiments with constructed stimuli as well as a corpus study of attested data.
Prediction is a central mechanism in the human language processing architecture. The psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature has seen a lively debate about what form prediction may take and what status it has for language processing in the human mind and brain. While predictions are a ubiquitous finding, the implications of these results for models of language processing differ. For instance, eyetracking data suggest that predictions may rely on sublexical orthographic information in natural reading, while electrophysiological data provide mixed evidence for form-based predictions during reading. Other research has revealed that humans rapidly adapt to text specifics and that their predictive capacity varies, broadly speaking, in accordance with inter- and intra-individual language proficiency, which cuts across the speaker groups (e.g. L1 vs. L2 speakers, skilled vs. untrained readers) traditionally used for experimental contrasts. There is therefore evidence that the kind and strength of linguistic predictions depend on (at least) three sources of variability in language processing: speaker, text genre and experimental method.
The aim of this Research Topic is to develop a better understanding of prediction in light of the three sources of variability in language processing, by providing an overview of state-of-the art research on predictive language processing and by bringing together research from various disciplines.
First, intra-and inter-individual differences and their influence on predictive processes remain underrepresented in experimental research on predictive processing. How do language users differ in their predictive abilities and strategies, and how are these differences shaped by e.g. biological, social and cultural factors?
Second, while language users experience great stylistic diversity in their daily language exposure and use, the majority of language processing research still focuses on a very constrained register of well-controlled sentences composed in the standard language. How are predictions shaped by extra- and meta-linguistic context, such as register/genre or accent/speaker identity, and how may this influence the processing of experimental items in another language or text variety?
Third, the Research Topic invites contributions that make use of a multi-method approach, such as combined behavioral and electrophysiological measures or experimental methods combined with measures extracted from corpus data. What opportunities and challenges do we face when integrating multiple approaches to examine linguistic, experimental and individual differences in human predictive capacity?
We welcome contributions from all areas of empirical psycho- and neurolinguistics, but contributions must explicitly address variability and variation in language and language processing. Relevant topics include individual differences and the impact of genre, modality, register and language variety. Contributions that go beyond single word and single sentence paradigms are especially desirable. Experimental, corpus-based, meta-analytic and review papers, as well as theoretical/opinion pieces are welcome; however, papers of the latter type should support their arguments with substantial empirical evidence from the literature. Particularly desirable are contributions which combine topics and/or methods, such as the impact of an individual's native dialect on processing of constructions that show variability in the standard language (e.g. choice of auxiliary, agreement of mass nouns, etc.) or experimental methods combined with measures extracted from corpus data such as information-theoretic surprisal.
Validating the Performativity Hypothesis to Neg-Raising using corpus data: Evidence from Polish
(2021)
Developments within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have meant that scholars are increasingly engaging with corpora and corpus-based resources, providing a source of “‘authentic’ language” to learners and educators (Mitchell 2020: 254), and contributing to “state-of-the-art research methodologies” (Deshors and Gries 2023: 164). However, there are areas in which progress can still be made, particularly in the area of metadata, such as information about the speaker and contexts of the language use, as well as increased variety in the text types and genres of corpora used to develop SLA materials (Paquot 2022: 36). This post discusses one such possibility for increasing the variety of text types and providing a rich source of authentic language that can be used to create engaging SLA materials, particularly for young people learning German, namely the use of the NottDeuYTSch corpus (to download the corpus in a variety of formats, see Cotgrove 2018).
In the present contribution, I investigate if and how the English and French editions of the Wiktionary collaborative dictionary can be used as a corpus for real time neology watch. This option is envisaged as a stopgap, when no satisfactory corpus is available. Wiktionary can also prove useful in addition to standard corpus analysis, to minimize the risk of overlooking new coinages and new senses. Since the collaborative dictionary’s quest for exhaustiveness makes the manual inspection of the new additions unreasonable (more than 31,000 English lemmas and 11,000 French lemmas entered the nomenclature in 2020), identifying the possibly relevant headwords is an issue. The solution proposed here is to use Wiktionary revision history to detect the (new or existing) entries that received the greatest number of modifications. The underlying hypothesis is that the most heavily edited pages can help identify the vocabulary related to “hot topics”, assuming that, in 2020, the pandemic-related vocabulary ranks high. I used two measures introduced by Lih (2004), whose aim was to estimate the quality of Wikipedia articles: the so-called rigour (number of edits per page) and diversity (number of unique contributors per page). In the present study, I propose to adapt the rigour and diversity metrics to Wiktionary in order to identify the pages that generated a particular stir, rather than to estimate the quality of the articles. I do not subscribe to the idea that – in Wiktionary – more revisions necessarily produce quality articles (more revisions often produce complete articles). I therefore adopt Lih’s notion of diversity to refer to the number of distinct contributors, but leave out the name rigour when it comes to the number of revisions. Wolfer and Müller-Spitzer (2016) used the two metrics to describe the dynamics of the German and English editions of Wiktionary. One of their findings was that the number of edits per page is correlated with corpus word frequencies. The variation in number of page edits should therefore reflect to some extent the variation of corpus word frequencies. Renouf (2013) established a relationship between the fluctuation of word frequencies in a diachronic corpus and various neological processes. In particular, she illustrated how specific events generate sudden frequency spikes for words previously unseen in the corpus. For instance, Eyjafjallajökull, the – existing – name of an Icelandic glacier, appeared in the corpus when the underlying volcano erupted in 2010 and disrupted air traffic in Europe. In order to check if the same phenomenon occurs when using Wiktionary edits instead of corpus frequencies, I manually annotated the most frequently revised entries (according to various ranking scores) with the binary tag: “related to Covid-19” (yes/no). The annotations were then used to test the ability of various configurations to detect relevant headwords from the English and French Wiktionary, namely Covid-19 neologisms and related existing words that deserve updates.
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 contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts.
In this article, we describe a user support solution for the digital humanities. As a case study, we show the development of the CLARIN-D Helpdesk from 2013 into the current support solution that has been extended for several other CLARIN-related software and projects and the DARIAH-ERIC. Furthermore, we describe a way towards a common support platform for CLARIAH-DE, which is currently in the final phase. We hope to further expand the help desk in the following years in order to act as a hub for user support and a central knowledge resource for the digital humanities not only in the German, but also in the European area and perhaps at some point worldwide.
Speakers’ linguistic experience is for the most part experience with language as used in conversational interaction. Though highly relevant for usage-based linguistics, the study of such data is as yet often left to other frameworks such as conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001). On the basis of a case study of salient usage patterns of the two German motion verbs kommen and gehen in spontaneous conversation, the present paper argues for a methodological integration of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods with qualitative conversation analytic approaches to further the usage-based study of conversational interaction.
Basnage’s revision (1701) of Furetiere’s Dictionnaire universel is profoundly different from Furetiere’s work in several regards. One of the most noticeable features of the dictionary lies in his in- creased use of usage labels. Although Furetiere already made use of usage labels (see Rey 1990), Basnage gives them a prominent role. As he states in the preface to his edition, a dictionary that aspires to the title of “universal” should teach how to speak in a polite way (“poliment”), right (“juste”) and making use of specific terminology for each art. He specifies, lemma by lemma, the diaphasic dimension by indicating the word’s register and context of use, the diastratic one by noting the differences in the use of the language within the social strata, the diachronic evolution by indicating both archaisms and neologisms, the diame- sic aspect by highlighting the gaps between oral and written language, the diatopic one by specifying either foreign borrowings or regionalisms.
After extracting the entries containing formulas such as “ce mot est...”, “ce terme est...” and similar ones, we compare the number of entries and the type of information provided by the two lexicographers1. In this paper, we will focus on Basnage’s innovative contribution. Furthermore, we will try to identify the lexi- cographer’s sources, i. e. we will try to establish on which grammars, collections of linguistic remarks or contemporary dictionaries Basnage relies his judgements.
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.
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects—social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying ‘thank you’ as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
Universal Dependency (UD) annotations, despite their usefulness for cross-lingual tasks and semantic applications, are not optimised for statistical parsing. In the paper, we ask what exactly causes the decrease in parsing accuracy when training a parser on UD-style annotations and whether the effect is similarly strong for all languages. We conduct a series of experiments where we systematically modify individual annotation decisions taken in the UD scheme and show that this results in an increased accuracy for most, but not for all languages. We show that the encoding in the UD scheme, in particular the decision to encode content words as heads, causes an increase in dependency length for nearly all treebanks and an increase in arc direction entropy for many languages, and evaluate the effect this has on parsing accuracy.
Ungoliant: An optimized pipeline for the generation of a very large-scale multilingual web corpus
(2021)
Since the introduction of large language models in Natural Language Processing, large raw corpora have played a crucial role in Computational Linguistics. However, most of these large raw corpora are either available only for English or not available to the general public due to copyright issues. Nevertheless, there are some examples of freely available multilingual corpora for training Deep Learning NLP models, such as the OSCAR and Paracrawl corpora. However, they have quality issues, especially for low-resource languages. Moreover, recreating or updating these corpora is very complex. In this work, we try to reproduce and improve the goclassy pipeline used to create the OSCAR corpus. We propose a new pipeline that is faster, modular, parameterizable, and well documented. We use it to create a corpus similar to OSCAR but larger and based on recent data. Also, unlike OSCAR, the metadata information is at the document level. We release our pipeline under an open source license and publish the corpus under a research-only license.
This article explores a sequence organizational phenomenon that results from the use of a loosely specifiable turn format (viz., That’s + wh-clause) for launching (next) sequences while at the same time connecting back to a prior turn. Using this practice creates a sequential juncture, i.e., a pivot-like nexus between one sequence and a next. In third position, such junctures serve to accomplish seamless sequential transitions from one sequence into a next by presenting the latter as locally occasioned. The practice may, however, also be deployed in second position to launch actions that have not been made relevant or provided for by the preceding action and exhibit response relevance themselves. The sequential junctures then become retro-sequential in character: They transform the projected trajectory of the sequence in progress and create interlocking sequential structures. These findings highlight that sequence is practice, while pointing to understudied interconnections between tying and sequentiality. Data are in English.
Twenty-two historical encyclopedias encoded in TEI: a new resource for the Digital Humanities
(2020)
This paper accompanies the corpus publication of EncycNet, a novel XML/TEI annotated corpus of 22 historical German encyclopedias from the early 18th to early 20th century. We describe the creation and annotation of the corpus, including the rationale for its development, suggested methodology for TEI annotation, possible use cases and future work. While many well-developed annotation standards for lexical resources exist, none can adequately model the encyclopedias at hand, and we therefore suggest how the TEI Lex-0 standard may be modified with additional guidelines for the annotation of historical encyclopedias. As the digitization and annotation of historical encyclopedias are settling on TEI as the de facto standard, our methodology may inform similar projects.
In this paper we present Trendi, a monitor corpus of written Slovene, which has been compiled recently as part of the SLED (Monitor corpus and related resources) project. The methodology and the contents of the corpus are presented, as well as the findings of the survey that aimed to identify the needs of potential users related to topical language use. The Trendi corpus currently contains news articles and other web content from 110 different sources, with the texts being collected and linguistically annotated on a daily basis. The corpus complements Gigafida 2.0, a 1.13-billion-word reference corpus of standard written Slovene. Also discussed are the ways in which the corpus will be integrated into various lexicographic projects, helping not only in the identification of neologisms but also in monitoring changes in already identified language phenomena.
Multinomial processing tree (MPT) models are a class of measurement models that account for categorical data by assuming a finite number of underlying cognitive processes. Traditionally, data are aggregated across participants and analyzed under the assumption of independently and identically distributed observations. Hierarchical Bayesian extensions of MPT models explicitly account for participant heterogeneity by assuming that the individual parameters follow a continuous hierarchical distribution.We provide an accessible introduction to hierarchical MPT modeling and present the user-friendly and comprehensive R package TreeBUGS, which implements the two most important hierarchical MPT approaches for participant heterogeneity—the beta-MPT approach (Smith & Batchelder, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 54:167-183, 2010) and the latent-trait MPT approach (Klauer, Psychometrika 75:70-98, 2010). TreeBUGS reads standard MPT model files and obtains Markov-chain Monte Carlo samples that approximate the posterior distribution. The functionality and output are tailored to the specific needs of MPT modelers and provide tests for the homogeneity of items and participants, individual and group parameter estimates, fit statistics, and within- and between-subjects comparisons, as well as goodness-of-fit and summary plots. We also propose and implement novel statistical extensions to include continuous and discrete predictors (as either fixed or random effects) in the latent-trait MPT model.
This article presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena which cause difficulties in the analysis of user-generated texts found on the web and in social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework of syntactic analysis. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this article is twofold: (1) to provide a condensed, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks—based on available literature—along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The overarching goal of this article is to provide a common framework for researchers interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus promoting cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been central to the spirit of UD.
Manual development of deep linguistic resources is time-consuming and costly and therefore often described as a bottleneck for traditional rule-based NLP. In my PhD thesis I present a treebank-based method for the automatic acquisition of LFG resources for German. The method automatically creates deep and rich linguistic presentations from labelled data (treebanks) and can be applied to large data sets. My research is based on and substantially extends previous work on automatically acquiring wide-coverage, deep, constraint-based grammatical resources from the English Penn-II treebank (Cahill et al.,2002; Burke et al., 2004; Cahill, 2004). Best results for English show a dependency f-score of 82.73% (Cahill et al., 2008) against the PARC 700 dependency bank, outperforming the best hand-crafted grammar of Kaplan et al. (2004). Preliminary work has been carried out to test the approach on languages other than English, providing proof of concept for the applicability of the method (Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill, 2004; Cahill et al., 2005). While first results have been promising, a number of important research questions have been raised. The original approach presented first in Cahill et al. (2002) is strongly tailored to English and the datastructures provided by the Penn-II treebank (Marcus et al., 1993). English is configurational and rather poor in inflectional forms. German, by contrast, features semi-free word order and a much richer morphology. Furthermore, treebanks for German differ considerably from the Penn-II treebank as regards data structures and encoding schemes underlying the grammar acquisition task. In my thesis I examine the impact of language-specific properties of German as well as linguistically motivated treebank design decisions on PCFG parsing and LFG grammar acquisition. I present experiments investigating the influence of treebank design on PCFG parsing and show which type of representations are useful for the PCFG and LFG grammar acquisition tasks. Furthermore, I present a novel approach to cross-treebank comparison, measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output from different treebanks. I complement the cross-treebank comparison by providing a human evaluation using TePaCoC, a new testsuite for testing parser performance on complex grammatical constructions. Manual evaluation on TePaCoC data provides new insights on the impact of flat vs. hierarchical annotation schemes on data-driven parsing. I present treebank-based LFG acquisition methodologies for two German treebanks. An extensive evaluation along different dimensions complements the investigation and provides valuable insights for the future development of treebanks.
Recent studies focussed on the question whether less-configurational languages like German are harder to parse than English, or whether the lower parsing scores are an artefact of treebank encoding schemes and data structures, as claimed by Kübler et al. (2006). This claim is based on the assumption that PARSEVAL metrics fully reflect parse quality across treebank encoding schemes. In this paper we present new experiments to test this claim. We use the PARSEVAL metric, the Leaf-Ancestor metric as well as a dependency-based evaluation, and present novel approaches measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output. We also provide extensive past-parsing crosstreebank conversion. The results of the experiments show that, contrary to Kübler et al. (2006), the question whether or not German is harder to parse than English remains undecided.
We present WOMBAT, a Python tool which supports NLP practitioners in accessing word embeddings from code. WOMBAT addresses common research problems, including unified access, scaling, and robust and reproducible preprocessing. Code that uses WOMBAT for accessing word embeddings is not only cleaner, more readable, and easier to reuse, but also much more efficient than code using standard in-memory methods: a Python script using WOMBAT for evaluating seven large word embedding collections (8.7M embedding vectors in total) on a simple SemEval sentence similarity task involving 250 raw sentence pairs completes in under ten seconds end-to-end on a standard notebook computer.
We propose a Cross-lingual Encoder-Decoder model that simultaneously translates and generates sentences with Semantic Role Labeling annotations in a resource-poor target language. Unlike annotation projection techniques, our model does not need parallel data during inference time. Our approach can be applied in monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual settings and is able to produce dependencybased and span-based SRL annotations. We benchmark the labeling performance of our model in different monolingual and multilingual settings using well-known SRL datasets. We then train our model in a cross-lingual setting to generate new SRL labeled data. Finally, we measure the effectiveness of our method by using the generated data to augment the training basis for resource-poor languages and perform manual evaluation to show that it produces high-quality sentences and assigns accurate semantic role annotations. Our proposed architecture offers a flexible method for leveraging SRL data in multiple languages.
While written corpora can be exploited without any linguistic annotations, speech corpora need at least a basic transcription to be of any use for linguistic research. The basic annotation of speech data usually consists of time-aligned orthographic transcriptions. To answer phonetic or phonological research questions, phonetic transcriptions are needed as well. However, manual annotation is very time-consuming and requires considerable skill and near-native competence. Therefore it can take years of speech corpus compilation and annotation before any analyses can be carried out. In this paper, approaches that address the transcription bottleneck of speech corpus exploitation are presented and discussed, including crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription, automatic phonetic alignment, and query-driven annotation. Currently, query-driven annotation and automatic phonetic alignment are being combined and applied in two speech research projects at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), whereas crowdsourcing the orthographic transcription still awaits implementation.
Linguistics is facing the challenge of many other sciences as it continues to grow into increasingly complex subfields, each with its own separate or overarching branches. While linguists are certainly aware of the overall structure of the research field, they cannot follow all developments other than those of their subfields. It is thus important to help specialists but also newcomers alike to bushwhack through evolved or unknown territory of linguistic data. A considerable amount of research data in linguistics is described with metadata. While studies described and published in archived journals and conference proceedings receive a quite homogeneous set of metadata tags — e.g., author, title, publisher —, this does not hold for the empirical data and analyses that underlie such studies. Moreover, lexicons, grammars, experimental data, and other types of resources come in different forms; and to make things worse, their description in terms of metadata is also not uniform, if existing at all. These problems are well-known and there are now a number of international initiatives — e.g., CLARIN, FlareNet, MetaNet, DARIAH — to build infrastructures for managing linguistic resources. The NaLiDa project, funded by the German Research Foundation, aims at facilitating the management and access to linguistic resources originating from German research institutions. In cooperation with the German SFB 833 research center, we are developing a combination of faceted and full-text search to give integrated access through heterogeneous metadata sets. Our approach is supported by a central registry for metadata field descriptors, and a component repository for structured groups of data categories as larger building blocks.
Neologisms, i.e., new words or meanings, are finding their way into everyday language use all the time. In the process, already existing elements of a language are recombined or linguistic material from other languages is borrowed. But are borrowed neologisms accepted similarly well by the speech community as neologisms that were formed from “native” material? We investigate this question based on neologisms in German. Building on the corresponding results of a corpus study, we test the hypothesis of whether “native” neologisms are more readily accepted than those borrowed from English. To do so, we use a psycholinguistic experimental paradigm that allows us to estimate the degree of uncertainty of the participants based on the mouse trajectories of their responses. Unexpectedly, our results suggest that the neologisms borrowed from English are accepted more frequently, more quickly, and more easily than the “native” ones. These effects, however, are restricted to people born after 1980, the so-called millenials. We propose potential explanations for this mismatch between corpus results and experimental data and argue, among other things, for a reinterpretation of previous corpus studies.
This paper addresses the task of finding antecedents for locally uninstantiated arguments. To resolve such null instantiations, we develop a weakly supervised approach that investigates and combines a number of linguistically motivated strategies that are inspired by work on semantic role labeling and corefence resolution. The performance of the system is competitive with the current state-of-the-art supervised system.
We investigate the task of detecting reliable statements about food-health relationships from natural language texts. For that purpose, we created a specially annotated web corpus from forum entries discussing the healthiness of certain food items. We examine a set of task-specific features (mostly) based on linguistic insights that are instrumental in finding utterances that are commonly perceived as reliable. These features are incorporated in a supervised classifier and compared against standard features that are widely used for various tasks in natural language processing, such as bag of words, part-of speech and syntactic parse information.
This paper focuses on aspects of the licensing of adverbial noun phrases (AdvNPs) in the HPSG grammar framework. In the first part, empirical issues will be discussed. A number of AdvNPs will be examined with respect to various linguistic phenomena in order to find out to what extent AdvNPs share syntactic and semantic properties with non-adverbial NPs. Based on empirical generalizations, a lexical constraint for licensing both AdvNPs and non-adverbial NPs will be provided. Further on, problems of structural licensing of phrases containing AdvNPs that arise within the standard HPSG framework of Pollard and Sag (1994) will be pointed out, and a possible solution will be proposed. The objective is to provide a constraint-based treatment of NPs which describes non-redundantly both their adverbial and non-adverbial usages. The analysis proposed in this paper applies lexical and phrasal implicational constraints and does not require any radical modifications or extensions of the standard HPSG geometry of Pollard and Sag (1994).
Since adverbial NPs have particularly high frequency and a wide spectrum of uses in inflectional languages such as Polish, we will take Polish data into consideration.
Towards Comprehensive Definitions of Data Quality for Audiovisual Annotated Language Resources
(2020)
Though digital infrastructures such as CLARIN have been successfully established and now provide large collections of digital resources, the lack of widely accepted standards for data quality and documentation still makes re-use of research data a difficult endeavour, especially for more complex resource types. The article gives a detailed overview over relevant characteristics of audiovisual annotated language resources and reviews possible approaches to data quality in terms of their suitability for the current context. Conclusively, various strategies are suggested in order to arrive at comprehensive and adequate definitions of data quality for this particular resource type.
Towards comprehensive definitions of data quality for audiovisual annotated language resources
(2021)
Though digital infrastructures such as CLARIN have been successfully established and now provide large collections of digital resources, the lack of widely accepted standards for data quality and documentation still makes re-use of research data a difficult endeavour, especially for more complex resource types. The article gives a detailed overview over relevant characteristics of audiovisual annotated language resources and reviews possible approaches to data quality in terms of their suitability for the current context. Conclusively, various strategies are suggested in order to arrive at comprehensive and adequate definitions of data quality for this specific resource type and possibly for digital language resources in general.
We present a major step towards the creation of the first high-coverage lexicon of polarity shifters. In this work, we bootstrap a lexicon of verbs by exploiting various linguistic features. Polarity shifters, such as ‘abandon’, are similar to negations (e.g. ‘not’) in that they move the polarity of a phrase towards its inverse, as in ‘abandon all hope’. While there exist lists of negation words, creating comprehensive lists of polarity shifters is far more challenging due to their sheer number. On a sample of manually annotated verbs we examine a variety of linguistic features for this task. Then we build a supervised classifier to increase coverage. We show that this approach drastically reduces the annotation effort while ensuring a high-precision lexicon. We also show that our acquired knowledge of verbal polarity shifters improves phrase-level sentiment analysis.
Measuring the quality of metadata is only possible by assessing the quality of the underlying schema and the metadata instance. We propose some factors that are measurable automatically for metadata according to the CMD framework, taking into account the variability of schemas that can be defined in this framework. The factors include among others the number of elements, the (re-)use of reusable components, the number of filled in elements. The resulting score can serve as an indicator of the overall quality of the CMD instance, used for feedback to metadata providers or to provide an overview of the overall quality of metadata within a repository. The score is independent of specific schemas and generalizable. An overall assessment of harvested metadata is provided in form of statistical summaries and the distribution, based on a corpus of harvested metadata. The score is implemented in XQuery and can be used in tools, editors and repositories.
This paper describes a first version of an integrated e-dictionary translating possessive constructions from English to Zulu. Zulu possessive constructions are difficult to learn for non-mother tongue speakers. When translating from English into Zulu, a speaker needs to be acquainted with the nominal classification of nouns indicating possession and possessor. Furthermore, (s)he needs to be informed about the morpho-syntactic rules associated with certain combinations of noun classes. Lastly, knowledge of morpho-phonetic changes is also required, because these influence the orthography of the output word forms. Our approach is a novel one in that we combine e-lexicography and natural language processing by developing a (web) interface supporting learners, as well as other users of the dictionary to produce Zulu possessive constructions. The final dictionary that we intend to develop will contain several thousand nouns which users can combine as they wish. It will also translate single words and frequently used multiword expressions, and allow users to test their own translations. On request, information about the morpho-syntactic and morpho-phonetic rules applied by the system are displayed together with the translation. Our approach follows the function theory: the dictionary supports users in text production, at the same time fulfilling a cognitive function.
In this paper, we deal with register-driven variation from a probabilistic perspective, as proposed in Schäfer, Bildhauer, Pankratz, Müller (2022). We compare two approaches to analyse this variation within HPSG. On the one hand, we consider a multiple-grammar approach and combine it with the architecture proposed in the CoreGram project Müller (2015) - discussing its advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, we take into account a single-grammar approach and argue that it appears to be superior due to its computational efficiency and cognitive plausibility.
The Stuttgart-Tübingen Tagset (STTS) is a widely used POS annotation scheme for German which provides 54 different tags for the analysis on the part of speech level. The tagset, however, does not distinguish between adverbs and different types of particles used for expressing modality, intensity, graduation, or to mark the focus of the sentence. In the paper, we present an extension to the STTS which provides tags for a more fine-grained analysis of modification, based on a syntactic perspective on parts of speech. We argue that the new classification not only enables us to do corpus-based linguistic studies on modification, but also improves statistical parsing. We give proof of concept by training a data-driven dependency parser on data from the TiGer treebank, providing the parser a) with the original STTS tags and b) with the new tags. Results show an improved labelled accuracy for the new, syntactically motivated classification.
Towards a part-of-speech ontology: encoding morphemic units of two South African Bantu languages
(2012)
This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It is therefore our goal to describe the morphemes of these languages in a single common database in order to outline and interpret commonalities and differences in more detail. Moreover, the relational database which is developed defines the underlying morphemic units (morphs) for both languages. It will be shown that the electronic part-of-speech ontology goes hand in hand with part-of-speech tagsets that label morphemic units. This database is designed as part of a forthcoming system providing lexicographic and linguistic knowledge on the official South African Bantu languages.
This paper presents a multilingual dictionary project of discourse markers. During its first stage, consisting of collecting the list of headwords, we used a parallel corpus to automatically extract units from texts written in Spanish, Catalan, English, French and German. We also applied a method to create a taxonomy structure for automatically organising the markers in clusters. As a result, we obtain an extensive, corpus-driven list of headwords. We present a prototype of the microstructure of the dictionary in the form of a standard XML database and describe the procedure to automatically fill in most of its fields (e.g., the type of DM, the equivalents in other languages, etc.), before human intervention.
This paper looks at whether, after two decades of corpus building for the Bantu languages, the time is ripe to begin using monitor corpora. As a proof-of-concept, the usefulness of a Lusoga monitor corpus for lexicographic purposes, in casu for the detection of neologisms, both in terms of new words and new meanings, is investigated and found useful.