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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.
The aim of this work is to describe criteria used in the process of inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries of Spanish within the framework of pandemic instability. Our starting point will be data obtained by the Antenas Neológicas Network (https://www.upf.edu/web/antenas), whose representation in three different lexicographic tools will be analyzed with the purpose of identifying problems in the methodology used to dictionarize – that is, how and what words were selected to be included in dictionaries and how they were represented in their entries – neologisms during the COVID-19 pandemic (sources and corpora of analysis, selection criteria, types of definition, among other aspects). Two of them are monolingual and COVID-19 lexical units were included as part of their updates: the Antenario, a dictionary of neologisms of Spanish varieties, and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española [DLE], a dictionary of general Spanish, published by the Real Academia Española [RAE], Spanish Royal Academy). The other is a bilingual unidirectional English-Spanish dictionary first published as a glossary, Diccionario de COVID-19 EN-ES [TREMEDICA], entirely made up of neological and non-neological lexical units related to the virus and the pandemic. Thus, the target lexis was either included in existing works or makes up the whole of a new tool located in a portal together with other lexicographic tools. Unlike other collections of COVID-19 vocabulary that kept cropping up as the pandemic unfolded, all three have been designed and written according to well-established lexicographic practices.
Our working hypothesis is that the need to record and define words which were recently created impacts the criteria for inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries about Spanish, including a certain degree of overlap of some features which are traditionally thought to be specific to each type of dictionary.
The annual microcensus provides Germany’s most important official statistics. Unlike a census it does not cover the whole population, but a representative 1%-sample of it. In 2017, the German microcensus asked a question on the language of the population, i.e. ‘Which language is mainly spoken in your household?’ Unfortunately, the question, its design and its position within the whole microcensus’ questionnaire feature several shortcomings. The main shortcoming is that multilingual repertoires cannot be captured by it. Recommendations for the improvement of the microcensus’ language question: first and foremost the question (i.e. its wording, design, and answer options) should make it possible to count multilingual repertoires.
This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a language or a dialect. Three representative surveys then provide data for the analysis: the Germany Survey 2008, the Northern Germany Survey 2016, and the Germany Survey 2017. The results of these surveys indicate that there is no consensus concerning the evaluation of Low German’s status and that attitudes towards Low German are related to, for example, proficiency in the language. These attitudes are shown to matter when counting speakers of Low German and investigating the status it has been accorded.
Language attitudes matter; they influence people’s behaviour and decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to learn more about patterns in the way that languages are evaluated. One means of doing so is using a quantitative approach with data representative of a whole population, so that results mirror dispositions at a societal level. This kind of approach is adopted here, with a focus on the situation in Germany. The article consists of two parts. First, I will present some results of a new representative survey on language attitudes in Germany (the Germany Survey 2017). Second, I will show how language attitudes penetrate even seemingly objective data collection processes by examining the German Microcensus. In 2017, for the first time in eighty years, the German Microcensus included a question on language use ‘at home’. Unfortunately, however, the question was clearly tainted by language attitudes instead of being objective. As a result, the Microcensus significantly misrepresents the linguistic reality of different migrant languages spoken in Germany.
Germany's (single) national official language is German. The dominance of German in schools, politics, the legal system, administration and the entire written public domain is so great that for a long time the lack of a coherent language policy was not seen as a problem. State restraint in this area is due, on the one hand, to historical reasons; on the other hand, it has been promoted by the federal system in Germany, which grants the federal states far-reaching responsibilities in the fields of education and culture. More recently, multilingualism among the population has increased and has resulted in a growing interest in understanding the language situation in Germany and (in particular) taking a closer look at the different minority languages. In 2017, for the first time in about 80 years, there is a question on the language of the population in the German micro census. The Institute for the German Language has also carried out various representative surveys; in the winter of 2017/201, a large representative survey with questions on the language repertoire and language attitudes is in the field.
Who understands Low German today and who can speak it? Who makes use of media and cultural events in Low German? What images do people in northern Germany associate with Low German and what is their view of their regional language?
These and further questions are answered in this brochure with the help of representative data collected in a telephone survey of a total of 1,632 people from eight federal states (Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein as well as Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt).
This paper outlines the generation process of a specifi computational linguistic representation termed the Multilingual Time Map, conceptually a multi-tape finit state transducer encoding linguistic data at different levels of granularity. The fi st component acquires phonological data from syllable labeled speech data, the second component define feature profiles the third component generates feature hierarchies and augments the acquired data with the define feature profiles and the fourth component displays the Multilingual Time Map as a graph.
Although the N400 was originally discovered in a paradigm designed to elicit a P300 (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980), its relationship with the P300 and how both overlapping event-related potentials (ERPs) determine behavioral profiles is still elusive. Here we conducted an ERP (N = 20) and a multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) experiment (N = 16) on distinct participant samples using an antonym paradigm (The opposite of black is white/nice/yellow with acceptability judgment). We hypothesized that SAT profiles incorporate processes of task-related decision-making (P300) and stimulus-related expectation violation (N400). We replicated previous ERP results (Roehm et al., 2007): in the correct condition (white), the expected target elicits a P300, while both expectation violations engender an N400 [reduced for related (yellow) vs. unrelated targets (nice)]. Using multivariate Bayesian mixed-effects models, we modeled the P300 and N400 responses simultaneously and found that correlation between residuals and subject-level random effects of each response window was minimal, suggesting that the components are largely independent. For the SAT data, we found that antonyms and unrelated targets had a similar slope (rate of increase in accuracy over time) and an asymptote at ceiling, while related targets showed both a lower slope and a lower asymptote, reaching only approximately 80% accuracy. Using a GLMM-based approach (Davidson and Martin, 2013), we modeled these dynamics using response time and condition as predictors. Replacing the predictor for condition with the averaged P300 and N400 amplitudes from the ERP experiment, we achieved identical model performance. We then examined the piecewise contribution of the P300 and N400 amplitudes with partial effects (see Hohenstein and Kliegl, 2015). Unsurprisingly, the P300 amplitude was the strongest contributor to the SAT-curve in the antonym condition and the N400 was the strongest contributor in the unrelated condition. In brief, this is the first demonstration of how overlapping ERP responses in one sample of participants predict behavioral SAT profiles of another sample. The P300 and N400 reflect two independent but interacting processes and the competition between these processes is reflected differently in behavioral parameters of speed and accuracy.
In this paper we examine the composition and interactional deployment of suspended assessments in ordinary German conversation. We define suspended assessments as lexicosyntactically incomplete assessing TCUs that share a distinct cluster of prosodic-phonetic features which auditorily makes them come off as 'left hanging' rather than cut-off (e.g., Schegloff/Jefferson/Sacks 1977; Jasperson 2002) or trailing-off (e.g., Local/Kelly 1986; Walker 2012). Using CA/IL methodology (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 2018) and drawing on a large body of video-recorded face-to-face conversations, we highlight the verbal, vocal and bodily-visual resources participants use to render such unfinished assessing TCUs recognizably incomplete and identify six recurrent usage types. Overall, the suspension of assessing TCUs appears to either serve as a practice for circumventing the production of assessments that are interactionally inapposite, or as a practice for coping with local contingencies that render the very doing of an assessment problematic for the speaker. Data are in German with English translations.
Preface
(2019)
Preface
(2020)
Physicists look at language
(2006)
This paper aims at verifying if the most important online Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries include some of the neologisms identified in texts published in the 1990s to 2000s, formed with the elements ciber-, e-, bio-, eco- and narco, which we refer to as fractomorphemes / fracto-morphèmes. Three online dictionaries were analyzed (Aulete, Houaiss and Michaelis), as well as Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa (VOLP). We were able to conclude that all three dictionaries and VOLP include neologisms with these elements; Michaelis and VOLP do not include separate entries for bound morphemes, whereas Houaiss includes entries for all of them and Aulete includes entries for bio-, eco- and narco-. Aulete also describes the neological meaning of eco- and narco-, whereas Houaiss does not.
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.
Collaborative work in NFDI
(2023)
The non-profit association National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) promotes science and research through a National Research Data Infrastructure. Its aim is to develop and establish an overarching research data management (RDM) for Germany and to increase the efficiency of the entire German science system. After a two-and-a-half year build up phase, the process of adding new consortia, each representing a different data domain, has ended in March 2023. NFDI now has 26 disciplinary consortia (and one additional basic service collaboration). Now the full extent of cross-consortial interaction is beginning to show.
The automatic recognition of idioms poses a challenging problem for NLP applications. Whereas native speakers can intuitively handle multiword expressions whose compositional meanings are hard to trace back to individual word semantics, there is still ample scope for improvement regarding computational approaches. We assume that idiomatic constructions can be characterized by gradual intensities of semantic non-compositionality, formal fixedness, and unusual usage context, and introduce a number of measures for these characteristics, comprising count-based and predictive collocation measures together with measures of context (un)similarity. We evaluate our approach on a manually labelled gold standard, derived from a corpus of German pop lyrics. To this end, we apply a Random Forest classifier to analyze the individual contribution of features for automatically detecting idioms, and study the trade-off between recall and precision. Finally, we evaluate the classifier on an independent dataset of idioms extracted from a list of Wikipedia idioms, achieving state-of-the art accuracy.
In order to differentiate between figurative and literal usage of verb-noun combinations for the shared task on the disambiguation of German Verbal Idioms issued for KONVENS 2021, we apply and extend an approach originally developed for detecting idioms in a dataset consisting of random ngram samples. The classification is done by implementing a rather shallow, statistics-based pipeline without intensive preprocessing and examinations on the morphosyntactic and semantic level. We describe the overall approach, the differences between the original dataset and the dataset of the KONVENS task, provide experimental classification results, and analyse the individual contributions of our feature sets.
This study investigates cross-language differences in pitch range and variation in four languages from two language groups: English and German (Germanic) and Bulgarian and Polish (Slavic). The analysis is based on large multi-speaker corpora (48 speakers for Polish, 60 for each of the other three languages). Linear mixed models were computed that include various distributional measures of pitch level, span and variation, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. A classification experiment based on the relevant parameter measures (span, kurtosis and skewness values for pitch distributions for each speaker) succeeded in separating the language groups.
This study presents the results of a large-scale comparison of various measures of pitch range and pitch variation in two Slavic (Bulgarian and Polish) and two Germanic (German and British English) languages. The productions of twenty-two speakers per language (eleven male and eleven female) in two different tasks (read passages and number sets) are compared. Significant differences between the language groups are found: German and English speakers use lower pitch maxima, narrower pitch span, and generally less variable pitch than Bulgarian and Polish speakers. These findings support the hypothesis that inguistic communities tend to be characterized by particular pitch profiles.
Based on specific linguistic landmarks in the speech signal, this study investigates pitch level and pitch span differences in English, German, Bulgarian and Polish. The analysis is based on 22 speakers per language (11 males and 11 females). Linear mixed models were computed that include various linguistic measures of pitch level and span, revealing characteristic differences across languages and between language groups. Pitch level appeared to have significantly higher values for the female speakers in the Slavic than the Germanic group. The male speakers showed slightly different results, with only the Polish speakers displaying significantly higher mean values for pitch level than the German males. Overall, the results show that the Slavic speakers tend to have a wider pitch span than the German speakers. But for the linguistic measure, namely for span between the initial peaks and the non-prominent valleys, we only find the difference between Polish and German speakers. We found a flatter intonation contour in German than in Polish, Bulgarian and English male and female speakers and differences in the frequency of the landmarks between languages. Concerning “speaker liveliness” we found that the speakers from the Slavic group are significantly livelier than the speakers from the Germanic group.
New KARL (Knowledge Acquisition and Representation Language) allows to specify all parts of a problem-solving method (PSM). It is a formal language with a well-defined semantics and thus allows to represent PSMs precisely and unambiguously yet abstracting from implementation detail. In this paper it is shown how the language KARL has been modified and extended to New KARL to better meet the needs for the representation of PSMs. Based on a conceptual structure of PSMs new language primitives are introduced for KARL to specify such a conceptual structure and to support the configuration of methods. An important goal for this extension was to preserve three important properties of KARL: to be (i) a conceptual, (ii) a formal, and (iii) an executable language.
This poster summarizes the results of the CLARIAH-DE Work Package 3: Skills Training and Promotion of Junior Researchers.
For a research field that is characterised by rapid technical development, CLARIAH-DE has to include the promotion of data literacy necessary for the efficient use of this digital research infrastructure as part of its objective. To develop, consolidate and refine a common programme in this area, work package 3 set itself the following sub goals:
- Consolidation of the activities from the previous projects into a joint service
- Cataloguing and reflecting on the methods and tools used in the research field, with the aim of identifying remaining gaps
- Skills training of, individual support for and the promotion of junior researchers
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.
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.
This paper presents the QUEST project and describes concepts and tools that are being developed within its framework. The goal of the project is to establish quality criteria and curation criteria for annotated audiovisual language data. Building on existing resources developed by the participating institutions earlier, QUEST develops tools that could be used to facilitate and verify adherence to these criteria. An important focus of the project is making these tools accessible for researchers without substantial technical background and helping them produce high-quality data. The main tools we intend to provide are the depositors’ questionnaire and automatic quality assurance, both developed as web applications. They are accompanied by a Knowledge base, which will contain recommendations and descriptions of best practices established in the course of the project. Conceptually, we split linguistic data into three resource classes (data deposits, collections and corpora). The class of a resource defines the strictness of the quality assurance it should undergo. This division is introduced so that too strict quality criteria do not prevent researchers from depositing their data.
This paper presents the QUEST project and describes concepts and tools that are being developed within its framework. The goal of the project is to establish quality criteria and curation criteria for annotated audiovisual language data. Building on existing resources developed by the participating institutions earlier, QUEST also develops tools that could be used to facilitate and verify adherence to these criteria. An important focus of the project is making these tools accessible for researchers without substantial technical background and helping them produce high-quality data. The main tools we intend to provide are a questionnaire and automatic quality assurance for depositors of language resources, both developed as web applications. They are accompanied by a knowledge base, which will contain recommendations and descriptions of best practices established in the course of the project. Conceptually, we consider three main data maturity levels in order to decide on a suitable level of strictness of the quality assurance. This division has been introduced to avoid that a set of ideal quality criteria prevent researchers from depositing or even assessing their (legacy) data. The tools described in the paper are work in progress and are expected to be released by the end of the QUEST project in 2022.
The CMDI Explorer
(2020)
We present the CMDI Explorer, a tool that empowers users to easily explore the contents of complex CMDI records and to process selected parts of them with little effort. The tool allows users, for instance, to analyse virtual collections represented by CMDI records, and to send collection items to other CLARIN services such as the Switchboard for subsequent processing. The CMDI Explorer hence adds functionality that many users felt was lacking from the CLARIN tool space.
CMDI Explorer
(2021)
We present CMDI Explorer, a tool that empowers users to easily explore the contents of complex CMDI records and to process selected parts of them with little effort. The tool allows users, for instance, to analyse virtual collections represented by CMDI records, and to send collection items to other CLARIN services such as the Switchboard for subsequent processing. CMDI Explorer hence adds functionality that many users felt was lacking from the CLARIN tool space.
This technology watch report discusses digital repository solutions, in the context of the research infrastructure projects CLARIAH-DE, CLARIN, and DARIAH. It provides an overview of different repository systems, comparing them and discussing their respective applicabilities from the perspectives of the project partners at the time of writing.
This paper addresses long-term archival for large corpora. Three aspects specific to language resources are focused, namely (1) the removal of resources for legal reasons, (2) versioning of (unchanged) objects in constantly growing resources, especially where objects can be part of multiple releases but also part of different collections, and (3) the conversion of data to new formats for digital preservation. It is motivated why language resources may have to be changed, and why formats may need to be converted. As a solution, the use of an intermediate proxy object called a signpost is suggested. The approach will be exemplified with respect to the corpora of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, namely the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) and the Archive for Spoken German (AGD).
Signposts for CLARIN
(2020)
An implementation of CMDI-based signposts and its use is presented in this paper. Arnold et al. 2020 present Signposts as a solution to challenges in long-term preservation of corpora, especially corpora that are continuously extended and subject to modification, e.g., due to legal injunctions, but also may overlap with respect to constituents, and may be subject to migrations to new data formats. We describe the contribution Signposts can make to the CLARIN infrastructure and document the design for the CMDI profile.
Signposts for CLARIN
(2021)
An implementation of CMDI-based signposts and its use is presented in this paper. Arnold, Fisseni et al. (2020) present signposts as a solution to challenges in long-term preservation of corpora. Though applicable to digital resources in general, we focus on corpora, especially those that are continuously extended or subject to modification, e.g., due to legal injunctions, but also may overlap with respect to constituents, and may be subject to migrations to new data formats. We describe the contribution signposts can make to the CLARIN infrastructure, notably virtual collections, and document the design for the CMDI profile.
Prominence has been widely studied on the word level and the syllable level. An extensive study comparing the two approaches is missing in the literature. This study investigates how word and syllable prominence relate to each other in German. We find that perceptual ratings based on the word level are more extreme than those based on the syllable level. The correlations between word prominence and acoustic features are greater than the correlations between syllable prominence and acoustic features.
The current paper presents a corpus containing 35 dialogues of spontaneously spoken southern German, including half an hour of articulography for 13 of the speakers. Speakers were seated in separate recording chambers, mimicking a telephone call, and recorded on individual audio channels. The corpus provides manually corrected word boundaries and automatically aligned segment boundaries. Annotations are provided in the Praat format. In addition to audio recordings, speakers filled out a detailed questionnaire, assessing among others their audio-visual consumption habits.
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.
In our study we use the experimental framework of priming to manipulate our subjects’ expectations of syllable prominence in sentences with a well-defined syntactic and phonological structure. It shows that it is possible to prime prominence patterns and that priming leads to significant differences in the judgment of syllable prominence.
The perception of prosodic prominence is influenced by different sources like different acoustic cues, linguistic expectations and context. We use a generalized additive model and a random forest to model the perceived prominence on a corpus of spoken German. Both models are able to explain over 80% of the variance. While the random forests give us some insights on the relative importance of the cues, the general additive model gives us insights on the interaction between different cues to prominence.
A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low frequency words. We found that word frequency differently affected the production of [i] and [a] at the temporal as well as the gestural level. Higher frequency of use predicted greater acoustic durations for long vowels; reduced durations for short vowels; articulatory trajectories with greater tongue height for [i] and more pronounced downward articulatory trajectories for [a]. These results show that the phonological contrast between short and long vowels is learned better with experience, and challenge both the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and current theories of German phonology.
Streefkerk defines prominence as the perceptually outstanding parts in spoken language. An optimal rating scale for syllable prominence has not been found yet. This paper evaluates a 4-point, an 11-point, a 31-point, and a continuous scale for the rating of syllable prominence and gives support for scales using a higher number of levels. Priming effects found by Arnold, et al., could only be replicated using the 31-point scale.
In previous research we showed that the priming paradigm can be used to significantly alter the prominence ratings of subjects. In that study we only looked at the changes in the subjects’ ratings. In the present study, we analyzed the acoustic parameters of the stimuli used in the priming study and investigated the correlation between prominence ratings and acoustic parameters. The results show that priming has a significant effect on these correlations. The contribution of acoustic features on perceived prominence was found to depend on the prominence pattern. If a dominantly prominent syllable is present in a given utterance, f0 and intensity contribute most to the perceived prominence, while duration contributes most when no syllable is dominantly prominent.
In many European languages, propositional arguments (PAs) can be realized as different types of structures. Cross-linguistically, complex structures with PAs show a systematic correlation between the strength of the semantic bond and the syntactic union (cf. Givón 2001; Wurmbrand/Lohninger 2023). Also, different languages show similarities with respect to the (lexical) licensing of different PAs (cf. Noonan 1985; Givón 2001; Cristofaro 2003 on different predicate types). However, on a more fine-grained level, a variation across languages can be observed both with respect to the syntactic-semantic properties of PAs as well as to their licensing and usage. This presentation takes a multi-contrastive view of different types of PAs as syntactic subjects and objects by looking at five European languages: EN, DE, IT, PL and HU. Our goal is to identify the parameters of variation in the clausal domain with PAs and by this to contribute to a better understanding of the individual language systems on the one hand and the nature of the linguistic variation in the clausal domain on the other hand. Phenomena and Methodology: We investigate the following types of PAs: direct object (DO) clauses (1), prepositional object (PO) clauses (2), subject clauses (3), and nominalizations (4, 5). Additionally, we discuss clause union phenomena (6, 7). The analyzed parameters include among others finiteness, linear position of the PA, (non) presence of a correlative element, (non) presence of a complementizer, lexical-semantic class of the embedding verb. The phenomena are analyzed based on corpus data (using mono- and multilingual corpora), experimental data (acceptability judgement surveys) or introspective data.
This article investigates mundane photo taking practices with personal mobile devices in the co-presence of others, as well as “divergent” self-initiated smartphone use, thereby exploring the impact of everyday technologies on social interaction. Utilizing multimodal conversation analysis, we examined sequences in which young adults take pictures of food and drinks in restaurants and cafés. Although everyday interactions are abundant in opportunities for accomplishing food photography as a side activity, our data show that taking pictures is also often prioritized over other activities. Through a detailed sequential analysis of video recordings and dynamic screen captures of mobile devices, we illustrate how photographers orient to the momentary opportunities for and relevance of photo taking, that is, how they systematically organize their photographing with respect to the ongoing social encounter and the (projected) changes in the material environment. We investigate how the participants multimodally negotiate the “mainness” and “sideness” (Mondada, 2014) of situated food photography and describe some particular features of participants’ conduct in moments of mundane multiactivity.
In this chapter, we will investigate smartphone-based showing sequences in everyday social encounters, that is, moments in which a personal mobile device is used for presenting (audio-)visual content to co-present participants. Despite a growing interest in object-centred sequences and mundane technology use, detailed accounts of the sequential, multimodal, and material dimensions of showing sequences are lacking. Based on video data of social interactions in different languages and on the framework of multimodal interaction analysis, this chapter will explore the link between mobile device use and social practices. We will analyse how smartphone showers and their recipients coordinate the manipulation of a technological object with multiple courses of action, and reflect upon the fundamental complexity of this by-now routine joint activity.
The ubiquity of smartphones has been recognised within conversation analysis as having an impact on conversational structures and on the participants’ interactional involvement. However, most of the previous studies have relied exclusively on video recordings of overall encounters and have not systematically considered what is taking place on the device. Due to the personal nature of smartphones and their small displays, onscreen activities are of limited visibility and are thus potentially opaque for both the co-present participants (“participant opacity”) and the researchers (“analytical opacity”). While opacity can be an inherent feature of smartphones in general, analytical opacity might not be desirable for research purposes. This chapter discusses how a recording set-up consisting of static cameras, wearable cameras and dynamic screen captures allowed us to address the analytical opacity of mobile devices. Excerpts from multi-source video data of everyday encounters will illustrate how the combination of multiple perspectives can increase the visibility of interactional phenomena, reveal new analytical objects and improve analytical granularity. More specifically, these examples will emphasise the analytical advantages and challenges of a combined recording set-up with regard to smartphone use as multiactivity, the role of the affordances of the mobile device, and the prototypicality and “naturalness” of the recorded practices.
Introduction
(2023)
A trainable prosodic model called SFC (Superposition of Functional Contours), proposed by Holm and Bailly, is here confronted to German intonation. Training material is the publicly available Siemens Synthesis Corpus that provides spoken utterances for high-quality speech synthesis. We describe the labeling framework and first evaluation results that compares the original prosody of test sentences of this corpus with their prosodic rendering by the proposed model and state-of-the-art systems available on-line on the web.