Korpuslinguistik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (200)
- Conference Proceeding (161)
- Article (105)
- Book (34)
- Part of Periodical (10)
- Other (9)
- Working Paper (7)
- Review (4)
- Doctoral Thesis (3)
- Preprint (3)
Language
- German (274)
- English (265)
- Multiple languages (1)
Keywords
- Korpus <Linguistik> (457)
- Deutsch (165)
- Gesprochene Sprache (64)
- Annotation (56)
- Forschungsdaten (36)
- Computerlinguistik (33)
- Korpuslinguistik (28)
- corpus linguistics (27)
- Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) (25)
- Grammatik (25)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (322)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (142)
- Postprint (23)
- Erstveröffentlichung (1)
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (237)
- Peer-Review (202)
- Peer-review (5)
- Qualifikationsarbeit (Dissertation, Habilitationsschrift) (5)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (3)
- Abschlussarbeit (Bachelor, Master, Diplom, Magister) (Bachelor, Master, Diss.) (2)
- Verlags-Lektorat (2)
- Peer-reviewed (1)
- Review-Status-unbekannt (1)
- Verlagslektorat (1)
Publisher
- de Gruyter (81)
- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (58)
- Narr (33)
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (25)
- European Language Resources Association (24)
- Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) (20)
- Narr Francke Attempto (15)
- Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (11)
- Linköping University Electronic Press (10)
- CLARIN (8)
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.
COSMAS. Ein Computersystem für den Zugriff auf Textkorpora. Version R.1.3-1. Benutzerhandbuch
(1994)
Seit der Forschung große Datenmengen und Rechenkapazitäten zur Verfügung stehen arbeitet auch die Sprachwissenschaft zunehmend datengeleitet. Datengeleitete Forschung geht nicht von einer Hypothese aus, sondern sucht nach statistischen Auffälligkeiten in den Daten. Sprache wird dabei oft stark vereinfacht als lineare Abfolge von Wörtern betrachtet. Diese Studie zeigt erstmals, wie der zusätzliche Einbezug syntaktischer Annotationen dabei hilft, sprachliche Strukturen des Deutschen besser zu erfassen.
Als Anwendungsbeispiel dient der Vergleich der Wissenschaftssprachen von Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Die beiden Fächer werden oft als Teildisziplinen der Germanistik zusammengefasst. Ihre wissenschaftliche Praxis unterscheidet sich jedoch systematisch hinsichtlich Forschungsdaten, Methoden und Erkenntnisinteressen, was sich auch in den Wissenschaftssprachen niederschlägt.
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 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.
In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie mithilfe korpuslinguistischer Verfahren Erkenntnisse über den Aufbau von Bedeutungsparaphrasen in Wörterbüchern gewonnen werden können. Diese Erkenntnisse sollen dazu genutzt werden, den Aufbau von Bedeutungsparaphrasen in Wörterbüchern umfassend und systematisch zu beschreiben, z.B. im Hinblick auf eine Optimierung der Bedeutungsparaphrasen für so genannte elektronische Wörterbücher oder für die Extraktion lexikalisch-semantischer Information für NLP-Zwecke.
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.
Anders als bei Sonntagspredigten haben die katholischen und evangelischen AutorInnen von Kirche in 1live nur 90 Sekunden zur Verfügung, um ihre christliche Botschaft zu vermitteln. Vorliegender Beitrag untersucht, wie die katholischen und evangelischen AutorInnen dies tun. Welche Inhalte erachten sie für relevant? Welche sprachliche Gestaltung wählen sie? Greifen katholische und evangelische AutorInnen zu den gleichen Inhalten und sprachlichen Mitteln oder zeigen sich konfessionelle Präferenzen und Differenzen? Diesen Fragen soll an einem Korpus aus Kirche in 1live-Radiopredigten aus den Jahren 2012 bis 2021 (= 2.755 Texte mit insgesamt 726.570 Token) mit einem quantitativen und qualitativen Methoden-Mix nachgegangen werden. Die Studie wird im Rahmen des DFG-Projekts „Sprache und Konfession 500 Jahre nach der Reformation“ am Germanistischen Institut der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster durchgeführt.
We present an approach to an aspect of managing complex access scenarios to large and heterogeneous corpora that involves handling user queries that, intentionally or due to the complexity of the queried resource, target texts or annotations outside of the given user’s permissions. We first outline the overall architecture of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, devoting some attention to the way in which it handles multiple query languages, by implementing ISO CQLF (Corpus Query Lingua Franca), which in turn constitutes a component crucial for the functionality discussed here. Next, we look at query rewriting as it is used by KorAP and zoom in on one kind of this procedure, namely the rewriting of queries that is forced by data access restrictions.
As the Web ought to be considered as a series of sources rather than as a source in itself, a problem facing corpus construction resides in meta-information and categorization. In addition, we need focused data to shed light on particular subfields of the digital public sphere. Blogs are relevant to that end, especially if the resulting web texts can be extracted along with metadata and made available in coherent and clearly describable collections.
Die Kernaufgabe der Projektgruppe des DWDS besteht darin, den in den Korpora enthaltenen Wortschatz lexikografisch und korpusbasiert zu beschreiben. In der modernen Lexikografie werden die Aussagen zu den sprachlichen Aspekten und Eigenschaften der beschriebenen Wörter und zu Besonderheiten ihrer Verwendung auf Korpusevidenz gestutzt. Empirisch können riesige Textsammlungen Hypothesen genauer oder ausführlicher belegen. Dabei wird deutlich, wie vielfältig Sprache im Gebrauch tatsachlich realisiert wird. Zu diesem Zweck bieten wir auf der DWDS-Plattform neben den zeitlich und nach Textsorten ausgewogenen Kernkorpora und den Zeitungskorpora eine Reihe von Spezialkorpora an, die hinsichtlich ihres Gegenstandes oder ihrer sprachlichen Charakteristika von den erstgenannten Korpora abweichen. Die Webkorpora bilden einen wesentlichen Bestandteil dieser Spezialkorpora.
We present a collection of (currently) about 5.500 commands directed to voice-controlled virtual assistants (VAs) by sixteen initial users of a VA system in their homes. The collection comprises recordings captured by the VA itself and with a conditional voice recorder (CVR) selectively capturing recordings including the VA-directed commands plus some surrounding context. Next to a description of the collection, we present initial findings on the patterns of use of the VA systems during the first weeks after installation, including usage timing, the development of usage frequency, distributions of sentence structures across commands, and (the development of) command success rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the applied collection-specific recording approach and describe potential research questions that can be investigated in the future, based on the collection, as well as the merit of combining quantitative corpus linguistic approaches with qualitative in-depth analyses of single cases.
In this paper we present the results of an automatic classification of Russian texts into three levels of difficulty. Our aim is to build a study corpus of Russian, in which a L2 student is able to select texts of a desired complexity. We are building on a pilot study, in which we classified Russian texts into two levels of difficulty. In the current paper, we apply the classification to an extended corpus of 577 labelled texts. The best-performing combination of features achieves an accuracy of 0,74 within at most one level difference.
In this paper, we present first results of training a classifier for discriminating Russian texts into different levels of difficulty. For the classification we considered both surface-oriented features adopted from readability assessments and more linguistically informed, positional features to classify texts into two levels of difficulty. This text classification is the main focus of our Levelled Study Corpus of Russian (LeStCoR), in which we aim to build a corpus adapted for language learning purposes – selecting simpler texts for beginner second language learners and more complex texts for advanced learners. The most discriminative feature in our pilot study was a lexical feature that approximates accessibility of the vocabulary by the second language learner in terms of the proportion of familiar words in the texts. The best feature setting achieved an accuracy of 0.91 on a pilot corpus of 209 texts.
In this paper, we present an overview of freely available web applications providing online access to spoken language corpora. We explore and discuss various solutions with which the corpus providers and corpus platform developers address the needs of researchers who are working with spoken language. The paper aims to contribute to the long-overdue exchange and discussion of methods and best practices in the design of online access to spoken language corpora.
We present the annotation of information structure in the MULI project. To learn more about the information structuring means in prosody, syntax and discourse, theory- independent features were defined for each level. We describe the features and illustrate them on an example sentence. To investigate the interplay of features, the representation has to allow for inspecting all three layers at the same time. This is realised by a stand-off XML mark-up with the word as the basic unit. The theory-neutral XML stand-off annotation allows integrating this resource with other linguistic resources such as the Tiger Treebank for German or the Penn treebank for English.
The KorAP project (“Korpusanalyseplattform der nächste Generation”, “Corpus-analysis platform of the next generation”), carried out at the Institut fUr Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, has as its goal the development of a modem, state-of-the-art corpus-analysis platform, capable of handling very large corpora and opening the perspectives for innovative linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse extremely large amounts of primary data and annotations, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary un-annotated text, and thus fully satisfying expectations associated with a scientific tool. The project started in July 2011 and is funded till June 2014. The demo presentation in December will be the first version following a preliminary feature freeze, and will open the alpha testing phase of the project.
The present paper describes Corpus Query Lingua Franca (ISO CQLF), a specification designed at ISO Technical Committee 37 Subcommittee 4 “Language resource management” for the purpose of facilitating the comparison of properties of corpus query languages. We overview the motivation for this endeavour and present its aims and its general architecture. CQLF is intended as a multi-part specification; here, we concentrate on the basic metamodel that provides a frame that the other parts fit in.
CoMParS is a resource under construction in the context of the long-term project German Grammar in European Comparison (GDE) at the IDS Mannheim. The principal goal of GDE is to create a novel contrastive grammar of German against the background of other European languages. Alongside German, which is the central focus, the core languages for comparison are English, French, Hungarian and Polish, representing different typological classes. Unlike traditional contrastive grammars available for German, which usually cover language pairs and are based on formal grammatical categories, the new GDE grammar is developed in the spirit of functionalist typology. This implies that, instead of formal criteria, cognitively motivated functional domains in terms of Givón (1984) are used as tertia comparationis. The purpose of CoMParS is to document the empirical basis of the theoretical assumptions of GDE-V and to illustrate the otherwise rather abstract content of grammar books by as many as possible naturally occurring and adequately presented multilingual examples, including information on their use in specific contexts and registers. These examples come from existing parallel corpora, and our presentation will focus on the legal aspects and consequences of this choice of language data.
In diesem Beitrag beschäftigen wir uns mit moralisierenden Sprachhandlungen, worunter wir diskursstrategische Verfahren verstehen, in denen die Beschreibung von Streitfragen und erforderlichen Handlungen mit moralischen Begriffen enggeführt werden. Auf moralische Werte verweisendes Vokabular (wie beispielsweise „Freiheit“, „Sicherheit“ oder „Glaubwürdigkeit“) wird dabei verwendet, um eine Forderung durchzusetzen, die auf diese Weise unhintergehbar erscheint und keiner weiteren Begründung oder Rechtfertigung bedarf. Im Fokus unserer Betrachtungen steht dementsprechend das aus pragma-linguistischer Sicht auffällige Phänomen einer spezifischen Redepraxis der Letztbegründung oder Unhintergehbarkeit, die wir als Pragmem auffassen und beschreiben. Hierfür skizzieren wir zunächst den in der linguistischen Pragmatik verorteten Zugang zu Praktiken der Moralisierung, betrachten sprachliche Formen des Moralisierens und deren kotextuellen und insbesondere pragma-syntaktischen Struktureinbettungen, um anschließend Hypothesen zu kontextuellen Wirkungsfunktionen aufzustellen. Darauf basierend leiten wir schließlich anhand von exemplarischen Korpusbelegen Strukturmuster des Moralisierens ab, die wir in dem Terminus „Pragmem“ verdichten und mittels qualitativer und quantitativer Analysen operationalisieren.
The paper presents best practices and results from projects in four countries dedicated to the creation of corpora of computer-mediated communication and social media interactions (CMC). Even though there are still many open issues related to building and annotating corpora of that type, there already exists a range of accessible solutions which have been tested in projects and which may serve as a starting point for a more precise discussion of how future standards for CMC corpora may (and should) be shaped like.
The paper presents best practices and results from projects dedicated to the creation of corpora of computer-mediated communication and social media interactions (CMC) from four different countries. Even though there are still many open issues related to building and annotating corpora of this type, there already exists a range of tested solutions which may serve as a starting point for a comprehensive discussion on how future standards for CMC corpora could (and should) be shaped like.
Converting and Representing Social Media Corpora into TEI: Schema and best practices from CLARIN-D
(2016)
The paper presents results from a curation project within CLARIN-D, in which an existing lMWord corpus of German chat communication has been integrated into the DEREKO and DWDS corpus infrastructures of the CLARIN-D centres at the Institute for the German Language (IDS, Mannheim) and at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW, Berlin). The focus is on the solutions developed for converting and representing the corpus in a TEI format.
The paper reports the results of the curation project ChatCorpus2CLARIN. The goal of the project was to develop a workflow and resources for the integration of an existing chat corpus into the CLARIN-D research infrastructure for language resources and tools in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (http://clarin-d.de). The paper presents an overview of the resources and practices developed in the project, describes the added value of the resource after its integration and discusses, as an outlook, to what extent these practices can be considered best practices which may be useful for the annotation and representation of other CMC and social media corpora.
Die MoCoDa 2 (https://db.mocoda2.de) ist eine webbasierte Infrastruktur für die Erhebung, Aufbereitung, Bereitstellung und Abfrage von Sprachdaten aus privater Messenger-Kommunikation (WhatsApp und ähnliche Anwendungen). Zentrale Komponenten bilden (1) eine Datenbank, die für die Verwaltung von WhatsApp-Sequenzen eingerichtet ist, die von Nutzer/innen gespendet und für linguistische Recherche- und Analysezwecke aufbereitet wurden, (2) ein Web-Frontend, das die Datenspender/innen dabei unterstützt, gespendete Sequenzen um analyserelevante Metadaten anzureichern und zu pseudonymisieren, und (3) ein Web-Frontend, über das die Daten für Zwecke in Forschung und Lehre abgefragt werden können. Der Aufbau der MoCoDa-2-Infrastruktur wurde im Rahmen des Programms „Infrastrukturelle Forderung für die Geistes- und Gesellschaftswissenschaften“ vom Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen gefordert. Ziel des Projekts ist es, ein aufbereitetes Korpus zur Sprache und Interaktion in der deutschsprachigen Messenger-Kommunikation bereitzustellen, das speziell auch für qualitative Untersuchungen eine wertvolle Grundlage bildet.
Einleitung
(2023)
Since 2013 representatives of several French and German CMC corpus projects have developed three customizations of the TEI-P5 standard for text encoding in order to adapt the encoding schema and models provided by the TEI to the structural peculiarities of CMC discourse. Based on the three schema versions, a 4th version has been created which takes into account the experiences from encoding our corpora and which is specifically designed for the submission of a feature request to the TEI council. On our poster we would present the structure of this schema and its relations (commonalities and differences) to the previous schemas.
In this Paper, we describe a schema and models which have been developed for the representation of corpora of computer-mediated communicatin (CMC corpora) using the representation framework provided by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We characterise CMC discourse as dialogic, sequentially organised interchange between humans and point out that many features of CMC are not adequately handled by current corpus encoding schemas and tools. We formulate desiderata for a representation of CMC in encoding schemes and argue why the TEI is a suitable framework for the encoding of CMC corpora. We propose a model of basic CMC units (utterances, posts, and nonverbal activities) and the macro- and micro-level structures of interactions in CMC environments. Based on these models, we introduce CMC-core, a TEI customisation for the encoding of CMC corpora, which defines CMC-specific encoding features on the four levels of elements, model classes, attribute classes, and modules of the TEI infrastructure. The description of our customisation is illustrated by encoding examples from corpora by researchers of the TEI SIG CMC, representing a variety of CMC genres, i.e. chat, wiki talk, twitter, blog, and Second Life interactions. The material described, i.e. schemata, encoding examples, and documentation, is available from the of the TEI CMC SIG Wiki and will accompany a feature request to the TEI council in late 2019.
Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über Korpora internetbasierter Kommunikation, die als digitale Ressourcen frei zur Verfügung stehen und für eigene linguistische Forschungsarbeiten genutzt werden können. In Abschnitt 1 erläutern wir korpuslinguistische Basiskonzepte, die für die Arbeit mit Korpora internetbasierter Kommunikation benötigt werden, und präzisieren die Sprachgebrauchsdomäne Internetbasierte Kommunikation, die den Gegenstand des hier beschriebenen Ressourcentyps bildet. Abschnitt 2 gibt einen Überblick zu existierenden Korpusressourcen für das Deutsche und stellt ausgewählte Korpora zu weiteren europäischen Sprachen vor. In Abschnitt 3 geben wir abschließend einen kurzen Einblick in aktuelle Forschungsfelder, die sich im Bereich der Korpuslinguistik und Sprachtechnologie in Bezug auf den Aufbau und die Aufbereitung von Korpora internetbasierter Kommunikation stellen.
Machine learning methods offer a great potential to automatically investigate large amounts of data in the humanities. Our contribution to the workshop reports about ongoing work in the BMBF project KobRA (http://www.kobra.tu-dortmund.de) where we apply machine learning methods to the analysis of big corpora in language-focused research of computer-mediated communication (CMC). At the workshop, we will discuss first results from training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for the classification of selected linguistic features in talk pages of the German Wikipedia corpus in DeReKo provided by the IDS Mannheim. We will investigate different representations of the data to integrate complex syntactic and semantic information for the SVM. The results shall foster both corpus-based research of CMC and the annotation of linguistic features in CMC corpora.
The paper reports on the results of a scientific colloquium dedicated to the creation of standards and best practices which are needed to facilitate the integration of language resources for CMC stemming from different origins and the linguistic analysis of CMC phenomena in different languages and genres. The key issue to be solved is that of interoperability – with respect to the structural representation of CMC genres, linguistic annotations metadata, and anonymization/pseudonymization schemas. The objective of the paper is to convince more projects to partake in a discussion about standards for CMC corpora and for the creation of a CMC corpus infrastructure across languages and genres. In view of the broad range of corpus projects which are currently underway all over Europe, there is a great window of opportunity for the creation of standards in a bottom-up approach.
Der Beitrag betrachtet lexikalisch-semantische Relationen aus einer emergentistischen Perspektive vor dem Hintergrund eines korpusgeleiteten empirisch-linguistischen Ansatzes. Er skizziert, wie eine systematische Erfassung und Auswertung des Kookkurrenzverhaltens von Lexemen – die Analyse der Ahnlichkeit von Kookkurrenzprofilen mit Hilfe von selbstorganisierenden lexikalischen Merkmalskarten und ihre im Diskurs verankerte Interpretation – wichtige Einblicke in die Struktur verschiedenartiger Verwendungsaspekte dieser Lexeme einschlieslich ihrer semantischen Nahe ermoglichen. Die vorgestellte Methodik wird dabei –uber die explorativ-analytischen Zielsetzungen hinaus – als eine abduktive, auf Theoriebildung zielende Generalisierungsstrategie im postulierten Lexikon-Syntax-Kontinuum verstanden. Zum Schluss werden die Anwendungsmoglichkeiten einiger Komponenten dieser Methodik in der Lexikografie, Lexikologie und Didaktik diskutiert.
Empirical synchronic language studies generally seek to investigate language phenomena for one point in time, even though this point in time is often not stated explicitly. Until today, surprisingly little research has addressed the implications of this time-dependency of synchronic research on the composition and analysis of data that are suitable for conducting such studies. Existing solutions and practices tend to be too general to meet the needs of all kinds of research questions. In this theoretical paper that is targeted at both corpus creators and corpus users, we propose to take a decidedly synchronic perspective on the relevant language data. Such a perspective may be realised either in terms of sampling criteria or in terms of analytical methods applied to the data. As a general approach for both realisations, we introduce and explore the FReD strategy (Frequency Relevance Decay) which models the relevance of language events from a synchronic perspective. This general strategy represents a whole family of synchronic perspectives that may be customised to meet the requirements imposed by the specific research questions and language domain under investigation.
The paper discusses from various angles the morphosyntactic annotation of DeReKo, the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Mannheim. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part covers the practical and technical aspects of this endeavor. We present results from a recent evaluation of tools for the annotation of German text resources that have been applied to DeReKo. These tools include commercial products, especially Xerox' Finite State Tools and the Machinese products developed by the Finnish company Connexor Oy, as well as software for which academic licenses are available free of charge for academic institutions, e.g. Helmut Schmid's Tree Tagger. The second part focuses on the linguistic interpretability of the corpus annotations and more general methodological considerations concerning scientifically sound empirical linguistic research. The main challenge here is that unlike the texts themselves, the morphosyntactic annotations of DeReKo do not have the status of observed data; instead they constitute a theory and implementation-dependent interpretation. In addition, because of the enormous size of DeReKo, a systematic manual verification of the automatic annotations is not feasible. In consequence, the expected degree of inaccuracy is very high, particularly wherever linguistically challenging phenomena, such as lexical or grammatical variation, are concerned. Given these facts, a researcher using the annotations blindly will run the risk of not actually studying the language but rather the annotation tool or the theory behind it. The paper gives an overview of possible pitfalls and ways to circumvent them and discusses the opportunities offered by using annotations in corpus-based and corpus-driven grammatical research against the background of a scientifically sound methodology.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF GERMAN USAGE A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH
This paper outlines some basic assumptions and principles underlying the corpus linguistics research and some application domains at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim. We briefly address three complementary but closely related tasks: first, the acquisition of very large corpora, second, the research on statistical methods for automatically extracting information about associations between word configurations, and, third, meeting the challenge of understanding the explanatory power of such methods both in theoretical linguistics and in other fields such as second language acquisition or lexicography. We argue that a systematic statistical analysis of huge bodies of text can reveal substantial insights into the language usage und change, far beyond just collocational patterning.
Our paper describes an experiment aimed to assessment of lexical coverage in web corpora in comparison with the traditional ones for two closely related Slavic languages from the lexicographers’ perspective. The preliminary results show that web corpora should not be considered ― inferior, but rather ― different.