Stimulus und Kognition. Zur Aktivierung mentaler Raumbilder

Within the context of investigations of cognitive spatial models, the study analyzes the effect of varying the informational structure of linguistic survey instruments. A group of informants was asked to draw German language areas on different types of geographic maps. First, in a quantitative approach we show how the specific informational structure of each map type influences the frequency and prominence of the named language areas. The second part of the study focuses on the localization of the mentioned language areas. Here we discuss the specific effects of each type of map and the information it contains on the localization. We also discuss general characteristics of the conceptualization of linguistic space as well as differences in the perception of the prominent language areas

Guided Distant Supervision for Multilingual Relation Extraction Data: Adapting to a New Language

Relation extraction is essential for extracting and understanding biographical information in the context of digital humanities and related subjects. There is a growing interest in the community to build datasets capable of training machine learning models to extract relationships. However, annotating such datasets can be expensive and time-consuming, in addition to being limited to English. This paper applies guided distant supervision to create a large biographical relationship extraction dataset for German. Our dataset, composed of more than 80,000 instances for nine relationship types, is the largest biographical German relationship extraction dataset. We also create a manually annotated dataset with 2000 instances to evaluate the models and release it together with the dataset compiled using guided distant supervision. We train several state-of-the-art machine learning models on the automatically created dataset and release them as well. Furthermore, we experiment with multilingual and cross-lingual experiments that could benefit many low-resource languages.Comment: Accepted to LREC-COLING 2024 (The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation

Crowdsourcing the linguistic landscape of a multilingual country. Introducing Lingscape in Luxembourg

This paper introduces the citizen science mobile application Lingscape. This free research tool for Android and iOS smartphones uses a crowdsourcing approach for research on linguistic landscapes. The paper discusses the use of mobile applications and crowdsourcing in linguistics, methodological requirements and problems of an app-based approach to the study of linguistic landscapes, and the key features of the app Lingscape. It considers the Luxembourgish cultural super-diversity as well as existing studies about the Luxembourgish linguistic landscape to set the background for the pilotstudy

Whatever happened to the Scene Encoding Hypothesis? Salience and pertinence as the missing links between the Usage-Based Model and Scene Encoding

peer reviewedWe argue that there has been a shift of focus from the Scene Encoding Hypothesis (SEH) to the Usage-Based Model (UBM) within the research on Construction Grammar (CxG) and that this shift was (and continues to be) characterized by the negligence of the SEH tradition. It is discussed what is the relationship between the respective explanatory scopes of the SEH and the UBM within the larger context of cognitive constructionist linguistics. A practical though not programmatic one-sided focus on the UBM produces theoretical problems leading to “flat” explanations. The UBM crowd in cognitive-functional linguistics has increasingly become aware of that problem which has led to the parallel increase in the prominence of the notion of “salience” within the UBM. We will argue that this notion, as it is applied in current research, is a potential bridge between the SEH and the UBM, since it may potentially (re-)introduce the neglected phenomenal qualities into the modeling of language competence and structure. However, in its current state within the theory of the UBM, the notion of “salience” falls short of the involved cognitive and practical intricacies and thus needs a careful theoretical and empirical re-evaluation. We will attempt to indicate a potential direction of this re-evaluation by introducing the concepts of 'salience and pertinence under a pragmatic motive’. In the course of our considerations, we will show that not only the UBM needs complementation by the SEH, for which salience and pertinence may be the bridge, but also that the SEH, despite its principal correctness, is itself fundamentally underspecified with respect to its qualifications. The potential bridge between the UBM and the SEH via salience and pertinence will also provide the qualifications the SEH was lacking so far

Capturing Regional Variation with Distributed Place Representations and Geographic Retrofitting

No abstract availabl