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In recent decades, the investigation of spoken language has become increasingly important in linguistic research. However, the spoken word is a fleeting phenomenon which is difficult to analyse and which requires an elaborate process of examination and appraisal. The Institute for the German Language (Institut für Deutsche Sprache) has the largest collection of recordings of spoken German, the German Speech Archive (Deutsches Spracharchiv [DSAv]). Up to now, the inadequate processing and accessibility of the valuable material held by the DSAv has been regarded as its major shortcoming. A solution to this problem is at hand now that a start has been made with the systematic modernization of the DSAv and, in particular, with the digitalization of its material. In recent years, we have been able to systematically exploit the unique opportunities provided by a new and easier form of access to the spoken language via the recorded sound signal, which can be realized digitally in the computer, and its linkage to the corresponding texts and documentary data. Through the integration of the existing data about the corpora and of the written versions of the texts into an information and full text database and through the linking of these data with the acoustic signal itself, it is now possible for us to construct a data pool which allows a better documentation of the material and provides rapid internal and external access to the sound recordings. Processed in such a way, the material of the German Speech Archive can now be regarded as having been saved for posterity. As a result, entirely new areas of inquiry and entirely new research perspectives have been opened up. This is true both for the work of the Institute itself and for linguistic research in German as a whole.
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.
KorAP is a corpus search and analysis platform, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). It supports very large corpora with multiple annotation layers, multiple query languages, and complex licensing scenarios. KorAP’s design aims to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable to serve the German Reference Corpus DEREKO for at least the next decade. To meet these requirements, we have adopted a highly modular microservice-based architecture. This paper outlines our approach: An architecture consisting of small components that are easy to extend, replace, and maintain. The components include a search backend, a user and corpus license management system, and a web-based user frontend. We also describe a general corpus query protocol used by all microservices for internal communications. KorAP is open source, licensed under BSD-2, and available on GitHub.
This paper describes the efforts in the field of sustainability of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim with respect to DEREKO (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German. With focus on re-usability and sustainability, we discuss its history and our future plans. We describe legal challenges related to the creation of a large and sustainable resource; sketch out the pipeline used to convert raw texts to the final corpus format and outline migration plans to TEI P5. Due to the fact, that the current version of the corpus management and query system is pushed towards its limits, we discuss the requirements for a new version which will be able to handle current and future DEREKO releases. Furthermore, we outline the institute’s plans in the field of digital preservation.
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.