Korpuslinguistik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (200)
- Conference Proceeding (161)
- Article (105)
- Book (33)
- Part of Periodical (10)
- Other (9)
- Working Paper (6)
- Review (4)
- Doctoral Thesis (3)
- Preprint (3)
Language
- German (272)
- English (265)
- Multiple languages (1)
Keywords
- Korpus <Linguistik> (455)
- Deutsch (164)
- Gesprochene Sprache (64)
- Annotation (56)
- Forschungsdaten (36)
- Computerlinguistik (33)
- Korpuslinguistik (28)
- corpus linguistics (27)
- Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) (25)
- Grammatik (25)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (321)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (141)
- Postprint (23)
- Erstveröffentlichung (1)
Reviewstate
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (235)
- 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 (32)
- 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.
We investigate the optional omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future tense construction. During the last two decades the frequency of omission has been rapidly increasing, and this process has received considerable attention in the literature. We test whether the knowledge which has been accumulated can yield accurate predictions of language variation and change. We extracted all occurrences of the construction from a very large collection of corpora. The dataset was automatically annotated with language-internal predictors which have previously been shown or hypothesized to affect the variation. We trained several models in order to make two kinds of predictions: whether the marker will be omitted in a specific utterance and how large the proportion of omissions will be for a given time period. For most of the approaches we tried, we were not able to achieve a better-than-baseline performance. The only exception was predicting the proportion of omissions using autoregressive integrated moving average models for one-step-ahead forecast, and in this case time was the only predictor that mattered. Our data suggest that most of the language-internal predictors do have some effect on the variation, but the effect is not strong enough to yield reliable predictions.
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.
The present thesis introduces KoralQuery, a protocol for the generic representation of queries to linguistic corpora. KoralQuery defines a set of types and operations which serve as abstract representations of linguistic entities and configurations. By combining these types and operations in a nested structure, the protocol may express linguistic structures of arbitrary complexity. It achieves a high degree of neutrality with regard to linguistic theory, as it provides flexible structures that allow for the setting of certain parameters to access several complementing and concurrent sources and layers of annotation on the same textual data. JSON-LD is used as a serialisation format for KoralQuery, which allows for the well-defined and normalised exchange of linguistic queries between query engines to promote their interoperability. The automatic translation of queries issued in any of three supported query languages to such KoralQuery serialisations is the second main contribution of this thesis. By employing the introduced translation module, query engines may also work independently of particular query languages, as their backend technology may rely entirely on the abstract KoralQuery representations of the queries. Thus, query engines may provide support for several query languages at once without any additional overhead. The original idea of a general format for the representation of linguistic queries comes from an initiative called Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF), whose theoretic backbone and practical considerations are outlined in the first part of this thesis. This part also includes a brief survey of three typologically different corpus query languages, thus demonstrating their wide variety of features and defining the minimal target space of linguistic types and operations to be covered by KoralQuery.
We describe a systematic and application-oriented approach to training and evaluating named entity recognition and classification (NERC) systems, the purpose of which is to identify an optimal system and to train an optimal model for named entity tagging DeReKo, a very large general-purpose corpus of contemporary German (Kupietz et al., 2010). DeReKo 's strong dispersion wrt. genre, register and time forces us to base our decision for a specific NERC system on an evaluation performed on a representative sample of DeReKo instead of performance figures that have been reported for the individual NERC systems when evaluated on more uniform and less diverse data. We create and manually annotate such a representative sample as evaluation data for three different NERC systems, for each of which various models are learnt on multiple training data. The proposed sampling method can be viewed as a generally applicable method for sampling evaluation data from an unbalanced target corpus for any sort of natural language processing.
Um gesprochene Sprache leichter analysieren zu können, müssen zuvor die auf Audio- oder Videokassetten befindlichen Aufnahmen transkribiert werden. Dabei kommt der Darstellung von Synchronität des Gesprochenen z.B. in Partiturschreibweise und dem Annotieren von Situationen, Verhalten einzelner Diskursteilnehmer u.dgl. eine bedeutende Rolle zu. Die Vielfalt der transkribierten Details und Informationsebenen setzt ein differenziertes Kodierungsschema voraus. Des Weiteren besteht bei der Gesprächsanalyse der Wunsch, neben dem Auffinden bestimmter Stellen im Schriftmaterial (Transkript) auch deren akustisches Ereignis wiedergeben zu können, was die Synchronisation von Text und Aufnahme voraussetzt.
Im Folgenden wird nach einer Einleitung, welche die Geschichte und Motive für die in diesem Papier beschriebenen Komponenten kurz darstellt, eine Zusammenfassung linguistischer Desiderate für die Erschließung von Gesprächskorpora präsentiert und im Anschluss daran ein Modell für Diskurstranskripte vorgestellt, das die technische Grundlage für die diskursanalytische Erschließung von Gesprächskorpora am Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) durch den Computer bildet. Anschließend wird der technische Prozess der Korpuserstellung skizziert, gefolgt von der Beschreibung dreier dabei zum Einsatz kommenden Werkzeuge, des DIDA-Editors, des SPRAT-Alignment- Systems und des DMM-Konverters. Schließlich wird die Volltextdatenbank COSMAS II vorgestellt, mit der die Analyse in den resultierenden SGML-Diskurstranskripten durchgeführt wird. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Fähigkeit von COSMAS II, mit Hilfe der aus der Diskursstruktur abgeleiteten Diskursmetrik eine breite Palette von Suchanfragen zu ermöglichen und sie mit Hilfe der grafischen Suchanfragekomponente als SGML-Suchanfragen zu formulieren. Abschließend wird kurz auf die geplante Weiterentwicklung eingegangen.
Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung mit umfassender Analyse der häufiger vorkommenenden Adverbbildungsmuster des Deutschen legt nahe, dass die Sättigung des internen Argumentplatzes eines ursprünglich relationalen Ausdrucks eine wichtige Rolle bei der Adverbproduktion spielt (Brandt 2020). Eine genauere Betrachtung der Unterschiede zwischen -ermaßen- vs. -erweise-Adverbien deutet auf eine grammatische Unterscheidung zwischen Satzadverbien und Adverbien der Art und Weise: Im Fall von -ermaßen erfolgt die Sättigung über Token-Reflexivität, während der interne Slot von -erweise- Bildungen über häufigere und möglicherweise expansive Mechanismen geschlossen wird. Darüber hinaus fördert die pleonastische Qualität von Bildungen auf der Basis gerundivaler Partizipien die Produktivität von -erweise Adverbien.
Statistische Methoden finden derzeit in der Sprachtechnologie vielfache Verwendung. Ein Grundgedanke dabei ist das Trainieren von Programmen auf große Mengen von Daten. Für das Trainieren von statistischen Sprachmodellen gilt zur Zeit das Motto „Je mehr Daten desto besser“. In unserem System zur maschinellen Übersetzung sehen wir eine fast konstante qualitative Verbesserung (gemessen als BLEU-Score) mit jeder Verdoppelung der monolingualen Trainingsdatenmenge. Selbst bei Mengen von ca. 20 Milliarden Wörtern aus Nachrichtentexten und ca. 200 Milliarden Wörtern aus Webseiten ist kein Abflachen der Lernkurve in Sicht.
Dieser Artikel gibt kurze Einführungen in statistische maschinelle Übersetzung, die Evaluation von Übersetzungen mit dem BLEU-Score, und in statistische Sprachmodelle. Wir zeigen, welch starken Einfluß die Größe der Trainingsdaten des Sprachmodells auf die Übersetzungsqualität hat. Danach wird die Speicherung großer Datenmengen, das Trainieren in einer parallelen Architektur und die effiziente Verwendung der bis zu 1 Terabyte großen Modelle in der maschinellen Übersetzung beschrieben.
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.
This contribution presents a quantitative approach to speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR) and steps towards its automatic detection. Automatic detection is necessary for studying ST&WR in a large number of texts and thus identifying developments in form and usage over time and in different types of texts. The contribution summarizes results of a pilot study: First, it describes the manual annotation of a corpus of short narrative texts in relation to linguistic descriptions of ST&WR. Then, two different techniques of automatic detection – a rule-based and a machine learning approach – are described and compared. Evaluation of the results shows success with automatic detection, especially for direct and indirect ST&WR.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
Corpus REDEWIEDERGABE
(2020)
This article presents the corpus REDEWIEDERGABE, a German-language historical corpus with detailed annotations for speech, thought and writing representation (ST&WR). With approximately 490,000 tokens, it is the largest resource of its kind. It can be used to answer literary and linguistic research questions and serve as training material for machine learning. This paper describes the composition of the corpus and the annotation structure, discusses some methodological decisions and gives basic statistics about the forms of ST&WR found in this corpus.
Projektvorstellung – Redewiedergabe. Eine literatur- und sprachwissenschaftliche Korpusanalyse
(2018)
Das laufende DFG-Projekt „Redewiedergabe“ stellt einen Anwendungsfall quantitativer Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft dar und beschäftigt sich mit dem Phänomen „Redewiedergabe“ auf der Grundlage großer Datenmengen. Zu diesem Zweck wird zum einen ein Korpus manuell mit Redewiedergabeformen annotiert, zum anderen werden Verfahren zur automatischen Erkennung des Phänomens entwickelt. Ziel ist es, Forschungsfragen nach der Entwicklung von Redewiedergabe vor allem im 19. Jahrhundert zu beantworten.
Bericht von der Dritten Internationalen Konferenz „Grammatik und Korpora“, Mannheim, 22. - 24.9.2009
(2009)
We present a corpus-driven approach to the study of multi-word expressions, which constitute a significant part of. As a data basis, we use collocation profiles computed from DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the largest available collection of written German which has approximately two billion word tokens and is located at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). We employ a strongly usage-based approach to multi-word expressions, which we think of as conventionalised patterns in language use that manifest themselves in recurrent syntagmatic patterns of words. They are defined by their distinct function in language. To find multi-word expressions, we allow ourselves to be guided by corpus data and statistical evidence as much as possible, making interpretative steps carefully and in a monitored fashion. We develop a procedure of interpretation that leads us from the evidence of collocation profiles to a collection of recurrent word patterns and finally to multi-word expressions. When building up a collection of multi-word expressions in this fashion, it becomes clear that the expressions can be defined on different levels of generalisation and are interrelated in various ways. This will be reflected in the documentation and presentation of the findings. We are planning to add annotation in a way that allows grouping the multi-word expressions according to different features and to add links between them to reflect their relationships, thus constructing a network of multi-word expressions.
We present recognizers for four very different types of speech, thought and writing representation (STWR) for German texts. The implementation is based on deep learning with two different customized contextual embeddings, namely FLAIR embeddings and BERT embeddings. This paper gives an evaluation of our recognizers with a particular focus on the differences in performance we observed between those two embeddings. FLAIR performed best for direct STWR (F1=0.85), BERT for indirect (F1=0.76) and free indirect (F1=0.59) STWR. For reported STWR, the comparison was inconclusive, but BERT gave the best average results and best individual model (F1=0.60). Our best recognizers, our customized language embeddings and most of our test and training data are freely available and can be found via www.redewiedergabe.de or at github.com/redewiedergabe.
Im Corona-Diskurs prallen völlig unterschiedliche Meinungen und Positionen zur Rolle des Staates aufeinander. Die Studie untersucht diese Positionen mit korpuslinguistischen Methoden anhand der Berichterstattung von Medien und Kommentaren von Leserinnen und Lesern in der Deutschschweiz. Dabei werden auch rechte und Corona-skeptische Plattformen in die Analyse einbezogen. Grundlage des korpuspragmatischen Zugangs ist die Berechnung und Interpretation von Word Embeddings, einer Methode zur Modellierung von semantischen Räumen. Es zeigt sich, wie sich im Diskurs inkommensurable Semantiken entwickeln.
To build a comparable Wikipedia corpus of German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Polish and Hungarian for contrastive grammar research, we used a set of XSLT stylesheets to transform the mediawiki anntations to XML. Furthermore, the data has been amnntated with word class information using different taggers. The outcome is a corpus with rich meta data and linguistic annotation that can be used for multilingual research in various linguistic topics.
Der korpuslinguistische Ansatz des Projekts »Korpusgrammatik« eröffnet neue Perspektiven auf unsere Sprachwirklichkeit allgemein und grammatische Regularitäten im Besonderen. Der vorliegende Band klärt auf, wie man korpuslinguistisch nach dem Standard fragen kann, wie die Projektkorpora aufgebaut und in einer Korpusdatenbank erschlossen sind, wie man in einem automatischen Abfragesystem der Variabilität der Sprache zu Leibe rückt und sie sogar messbar macht, schließlich aber auch, wo die Grenzen quantitativer Korpusanalysen liegen. Pilotstudien deuten an, wie der Ansatz unsere grammatischen Horizonte erweitert und die Grammatikografie voranbringt.
Einleitung
(2018)
With an increasing amount of text data available it is possible to automatically extract a variety of information about language. One way to obtain knowledge about subtle relations and analogies between words is to observe words which are used in the same context. Recently, Mikolov et al. proposed a method to efficiently compute Euclidean word representations which seem to capture subtle relations and analogies between words in the English language. We demonstrate that this method also captures analogies in the German language. Furthermore, we show that we can transfer information extracted from large non-annotated corpora into small annotated corpora, which are then, in turn, used for training NLP systems.
This paper describes the application of probabilistic part of speech taggers to the Dzongkha language. A tag set containing 66 tags is designed, which is based on the Penn Treebank. A training corpus of 40,247 tokens is utilized to train the model. Using the lexicon extracted from the training corpus and lexicon from the available word list, we used two statistical taggers for comparison reasons. The best result achieved was 93.1% accuracy in a 10-fold cross validation on the training set. The winning tagger was thereafter applied to annotate a 570,247 token corpus.
In this paper, we describe MLSA, a publicly available multi-layered reference corpus for German-language sentiment analysis. The construction of the corpus is based on the manual annotation of 270 German-language sentences considering three different layers of granularity. The sentence-layer annotation, as the most coarse-grained annotation, focuses on aspects of objectivity, subjectivity and the overall polarity of the respective sentences. Layer 2 is concerned with polarity on the word- and phrase-level, annotating both subjective and factual language. The annotations on Layer 3 focus on the expression-level, denoting frames of private states such as objective and direct speech events. These three layers and their respective annotations are intended to be fully independent of each other. At the same time, exploring for and discovering interactions that may exist between different layers should also be possible. The reliability of the respective annotations was assessed using the average pairwise agreement and Fleiss’ multi-rater measures. We believe that MLSA is a beneficial resource for sentiment analysis research, algorithms and applications that focus on the German language.
This paper introduces the recently started DRuKoLA-project that aims at providing mechanisms to flexibly draw virtual comparable corpora from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language CoRoLa in order to use these virtual corpora as empirical basis for contrastive linguistic research.
Das hier vorgeführte Schienenbild ist das in Anlehnung an Wittenburg (2009) als Erweiterungsinstrument gewählte Mittel in dem Versuch, Computertechnologie, linguistische Forschung und Vernetzung am Institut für Deutsche Sprache in deren rasch wachsenden Vielschichtigkeit zu beschreiben. Hier werden u. a. drei Blickwinkel, der des Technologie entwickelnden Wissenschaftlers, des entwickelnden Nutzers und des Nutzers von Informationstechnologie in der linguistischen Forschung vereint und um eine für den Sprachvergleich neue Dimension, die sprachspezifische Parameter von Analyseinstrumenten miteinander harmonisiert, erweitert.
Introduction
(2019)
This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas:
1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation.
2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language.
3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis.
By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
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).
This paper analyses intensification in German digitally-mediated communication (DMC) using a corpus of YouTube comments written by young people (the NottDeuYTSch corpus). Research on intensification in written language has traditionally focused on two grammatical aspects: syntactic intensification, i.e. the use of particles and other lexical items and morphological intensification, i.e. the use of compounding. Using a wide variety og examples from the corpus, the paper identifies novel ways that have been used for intensification in DMC, and suggests a new taxonomy of classification for future analysis of intensification.
This article details the process of creating the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube-Sprache ('The Nottingham German YouTube Language Corpus' - or NottDeuYTSch corpus) and outlines potential research opportunities. The corpus was compiled to analyse the online language produced by young German-speakers and offers significant opportunity for in-depth research across several linguistic fields including lexis, morphology, syntax, orthography, and conversational and discursive analysis. The NottDeuYTSch corpus contains over 33 million words taken from approximately 3 million YouTube comments from videos published between 2008 to 2018 targeted at a young, German-speaking demographic and represent an authentic language snapshot of young German speakers. The corpus was proportionally sampled based on video category and year from a database of 112 popular German-speaking YouTube channels in the DACH region for optimal representativeness and balance and contains a considerable amount of associated metadata for each comment that enable further longitudinal cross-sectional analyses. The NottDeuYTSch corpus is available for analysis as part of the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo).
This paper introduces the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube-Sprache (‘The Nottingham German YouTube Language Corpus’ - or NottDeuYTSch corpus). The corpus comprises over 33 million words, taken from roughly 3 million YouTube comments published between 2008 and 2018, written by a young, German-speaking demographic. The NottDeuYTSch corpus provides an authentic and representative linguistic snapshot of young German speakers and offers significant opportunities for in-depth research in several linguistic fields, such as lexis, morphology, syntax, orthography, multilingualism, and conversational and discursive analysis.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus is a freely available collection of YouTube comments written under German-speaking videos by young people between 2008 and 2018. The article uses the NottDeuYTSch corpus to investigate how YouTube comments can be used to produce learning materials and how corpora of Digitally-Mediated Communication can benefit intermediate learners of German. The article details the effects of authentic communication within YouTube comments on teenage learners, examining how they can influence the psycholinguistic factors of motivation, foreign language anxiety, and willingness to communicate. The article also discusses the benefits and limitations of using authentic corpus material for the development of teaching material.
The present paper examines a variety of ways in which the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa) can be used. A multitude of examples intends to highlight a wide range of interrogation possibilities that CoRoLa opens for different types of users. The querying of CoRoLa displayed here is supported by the KorAP frontend, through the querying language Poliqarp. Interrogations address annotation layers, such as the lexical, morphological and, in the near future, the syntactical layer, as well as the metadata. Other issues discussed are how to build a virtual corpus, how to deal with errors, how to find expressions and how to identify expressions.
Brown clustering has been used to help increase parsing performance for morphologically rich languages. However, much of the work has focused on using clustering techniques to replace terminal nodes or as a feature for parsing. Instead, we choose to examine how effectively Brown clustering is for unlexicalized parsing by creating data-driven POS tagsets which are then used with the Berkeley parser. We investigate cluster sizes as well as on what information (e.g. words vs. lemmas) clustering will yield the best parser performance. Our results approach the current state of the art results for the German T¨uBa-D/Z treebank when using parser internal tagging.
Many applications in Natural Language Processing require a semantic analysis of sentences in terms of truth-conditional representations, often with specific desiderata in terms of which information needs to be included in the semantic analysis. However, there are only very few tools that allow such an analysis. We investigate the representations of an automatic analysis pipeline of the C&C parser and Boxer to determine whether Boxer’s analyses in form of Discourse Representation Structure can be successfully converted into a more surface oriented event semantic representation, which will serve as input for a fusion algorithm for fusing hard and soft information. We use a data set of synthetic counter intelligence messages for our investigation. We provide a basic pipeline for conversion and subsequently discuss areas in which ambiguities and differences between the semantic representations present challenges in the conversion process.
Nearly all of the very large corpora of English are “static”, which allows a wide range of one-time, pre-processed data, such as collocates. The challenge comes with large “dynamic” corpora, which are updated regularly, and where preprocessing is much more difficult. This paper provides an overview of the NOW corpus (News on the Web), which is currently 8.2 billion words in size, and which grows by about 170 million words each month. We discuss the architecture of NOW, and provide many examples that show how data from NOW can (uniquely) be extracted to look at a wide range of ongoing changes in English.
Interoperability in an Infrastructure Enabling Multidisciplinary Research: The case of CLARIN
(2020)
CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It supports the use and study of language data in general and aims to increase the potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and disciplines, all in line with the European agenda for Open Science. Data infrastructures such as CLARIN have recently embarked on the emerging frameworks for the federation of infrastructural services, such as the European Open Science Cloud and the integration of services resulting from multidisciplinary collaboration in federated services for the wider domain of the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In this paper we describe the interoperability requirements that arise through the existing ambitions and the emerging frameworks. The interoperability theme will be addressed at several levels, including organisation and ecosystem, design of workflow services, data curation, performance measurement and collaboration. For each level, some concrete outcomes are described.
Data Mining with Shallow vs. Linguistic Features to Study Diversification of Scientific Registers
(2014)
We present a methodology to analyze the linguistic evolution of scientific registers with data mining techniques, comparing the insights gained from shallow vs. linguistic features. The focus is on selected scientific disciplines at the boundaries to computer science (computational linguistics, bioinformatics, digital construction, microelectronics). The data basis is the English Scientific Text Corpus (SCITEX) which covers a time range of roughly thirty years (1970/80s to early 2000s) (Degaetano-Ortlieb et al., 2013; Teich and Fankhauser, 2010). In particular, we investigate the diversification of scientific registers over time. Our theoretical basis is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its specific incarnation of register theory (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). In terms of methods, we combine corpus-based methods of feature extraction and data mining techniques.
Wer sich mit grammatischen Phänomenen historischer Sprachstufen beschäftigt, kann seine empirischen Daten bekanntermaßen nicht auf der Grundlage von Sprecherurteilen gewinnen, sondern muss zunächst Korpusrecherchen betreiben. Die Größe des auszuwählenden Korpus ist sehr stark phänomenabhängig: So reicht es im Bereich der Syntax in der Regel nicht aus, kleinere Textausschnitte aus verschiedenen Textquellen zu einem Korpus zusammenzufügen, vielmehr müssen vollständige Texte nicht nur nach raum-zeitlichen Koordinaten, sondern auch textsortenabhängig ausgewählt werden, um ein repräsentatives Korpus für eine spezifische Sprachstufe zu erstellen. Da eine manuelle Sichtung dieser doch recht großen Korpora sich sehr zeitaufwändig gestaltet, bietet sich gerade im Bereich der historischen Syntax der Einsatz von syntaktisch annotierten, digitalen Korpora an. Im folgenden Beitrag wird der Aufbau einer solchen Baumbank für das Frühneuhochdeutsche einschließlich der verfügbaren Recherchemöglichkeiten vorgestellt.
Metadaten zu Gesprächen und den beteiligten Sprecher/-innen enthalten Informationen, die für die Beschreibung, Erschließung und Analyse von Korpora wichtig sind. Bisher werden sie jedoch in der Konversationsanalyse und der Interaktionalen Linguistik so gut wie nicht genutzt. Dieser Beitrag zeigt exemplarisch, wie Metadaten des Gesprächskorpus „Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch“ (FOLK) im Rahmen einer interaktionslinguistischen Untersuchung verwendet werden können, um Regularitäten der Verwendung einer untersuchten Gesprächspraktik zu identifizieren und ihren Zusammenhang mit den Eigenschaften von Aktivitäten und Sprecherrollen zu klären. In allgemeinerer Perspektive diskutiert der Beitrag, wie und an welchen Stellen einer interaktionslinguistischen Untersuchung Metadaten von Nutzen sein können und wie ihr Stellenwert im Rahmen dieser Methodologie kritisch reflektiert werden muss.
In this paper we present some preliminary considerations concerning the possibility of automatic parsing an annotated corpus for N-N compounds. This should in prin- ciple be possible at least for relational and stereotype compounds, if the lemmatization of the corpus connects the lemmata with lexical entries as described in Höhle (1982). These lexical entries then supply the necessary information about the argument structure of a relational noun or about the stereotypical purpose associated with the noun’s referent which can be used to establish a relation between the first and the head constituent of the compound.