Open Access

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.

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.

Making research data publicly available for evaluation or reuse is a fundamental part of good scientific practice. However, regulations such as copyright law can prevent this practice and thereby hamper scientific progress. In Germany, text-based research disciplines have for a long time been mostly unable to publish corpora made from material outside of the public domain, effectively excluding contemporary works. While there are approaches to obfuscate text material in a way that it is no longer covered by the original copyright, many use cases still require the raw textual context for evaluation or follow-up research. Recent changes in copyright now permit text and data mining on copyrighted works. However, questions regarding reusability and sharing of such corpora at a later time are still not answered to a satisfying degree. We propose a workflow that allows interested third parties to access customized excerpts of protected corpora in accordance with current German copyright law and the soon to be implemented guidelines of the Digital Single Market directive. Our prototype is a very lightweight web interface that builds on commonly used repository software and web standards.

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.

Die Dokumentation und Untersuchung deutscher Sprachinselvarietäten war schon immer eine der wichtigsten Aufgaben der germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft. Mittlerweile stellt sich aber immer öfter die Frage der Nachhaltigkeit der erhobenen Spachinseldaten. Insbesondere in Bezug auf die vom Sprachtod bedrohten Varietäten, wie z.B. im Fall der russlanddeutschen Dialekte aus den noch intakten Sprachinseln der ehemaligen Sowjetunion, ist es äußerst wichtig, die existierenden Audioaufnahmen systematisch und dauerhaft zu archivieren. Aber nicht nur die Archivierung, sondern auch der freie und unkomplizierte Zugang zu diesen Materialien ist ein wesentlicher Aspekt im Konzept der Nachhaltigkeit. Wie sollte dieser Zugang aber gestaltet sein und in welcher Form sollen die Daten präsentiert werden? Auf genau diese Frage ist das Projekt „Elektronisches Wörterbuch. Ein Online-Informationsangebot zu Sprache und Dialekten der Russlanddeutschen" eingegangen. In diesem Projekt wurden historische Tonaufnahmen russlanddeutscher Dialekte linguistisch aufbereitet und in Form einer strukturierten Russlanddeutschen Dialektdatenbank (RuDiDat) online veröffentlicht. Diese Datenbank ist frei verfügbar und ermöglicht die Recherche im Korpus des Russlanddeutschen. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die Datenbank vor und thematisiert Herausforderungen, die durch unterschiedliche Ausprägungsformen des Russlanddeutschen entstehen könnten, wenn man die im Internet freigegebenen Sprachinseldaten für vergleichende Analysen heranzieht.