Polarity preference of verbs: What could verbs reveal about the polarity of their objects?

The current endeavour focuses on the notion of positive versus negative polarity preference of verbs for their direct objects. This preference has to be distinguished from a verb's own prior polarity - for the same verb, these two properties might even be inverse. Polarity preferences of verbs are extracted on the basis of a large and dependency- parsed corpus by means of statistical measures. We observed verbs with a relatively clear positive or negative polarity preference, as well as cases of verbs where positive and negative polarity preference is balanced (we call these bipolar-preference verbs). Given clear-cut polarity preferences of a verb, nouns, whose polarity is yet unknown, can now be classified. We reached a lower bound of 81% precision in our experiments, whereas the upper bound goes up to 92%

Inducing the contextual and prior polarity of nouns from the induced polarity preference of verbs

The current endeavour focuses on the notion of positive versus negative polarity preferences of verbs for their direct objects. We observed verbs with a relatively clear positive or negative polarity preference (called polar), as well as cases of verbs where positive and negative polarity preference is balanced (called bi-polar). These polarity preferences of verbs are induced on the basis of a large dependency-parsed corpus by means of statistical measures and a lexicon of manually curated prior noun polarities. Given (learned) polar verbs, the contextual polarity of their direct objects can be derived. We reached a lower bound of 81.97% and an upper bound of 93.34% precision in these experiments. The polarity of a noun was predicted by the majority vote of the verbs that take that noun as its direct object in our corpus. In a second experimental setting,1 we also considered the role of neutral nouns co-occurring with these verbs. We found that the induction of the (tripartite) prior polarity of nouns can be achieved with a precision of 75.97%

Die Initiative Korpus Südtirol

Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die Initiative Korpus Südtirol und beschreibt das im Entstehen begriffene Korpus des geschriebenen Deutschen in Südtirol. Dabei wird insbesondere auf den inhaltlichen Aufbau, die erhobenen Metadaten sowie die Organisation und Architektur des Gesamtsystems eingegangen. Zudem werden einige Anwendungsmöglichkeiten des Korpus Südtirol kurz vorgestellt, etwa für die Sprachdidaktik oder für varietätenlinguistische Untersuchungen, die auf der Grundlage eigens entwickelter Werkzeuge durchgeführt werden und deren Ergebnisse einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Beschreibung der deutschen Sprache in Südtirol leisten

Depth and mesh size effect on discarding practices in trammel net fishery

Trammel nets are one of the most commonly exploited gears of small scale fisheries used all along the Greek coasts. However, knowledge on the discards of this gear is scarce. Discards in trammel net fishery include species with no commercial value, or commercial species, which cannot be distributed in the market because of their small size, or because they come on board already destroyed. The mesh size of the nets and depth of fishing operations are two factors affecting the proportion of the discards.JRC.DG.G.4-Maritime affair

MLSA ― A Multi-layered Reference Corpus for German Sentiment Analysis

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

METIERS IN SMALL SCALE FISHERIES IN N.E. AEGEAN

For the numerous métiers of the small scale fisheries in the North-Eastern Aegean sea (Lesvos and Limnos isl.), herein we present the catch composition per métier, the fishing effort and the estimation of total production. Daily logbooks were distributed to 20 professional coastal fishermen to record for a one year period their fishing activity. In total, 68 type of fisheries were reported, grouped in 20 different métiers...JRC.G.4-Maritime affair

MLSA – A Multi-layered Reference Corpus for German Sentiment Analysis

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

Korpora in Lehre und Forschung

Today, the teaching of knowledge is facing a twofold challenge: the demand for comprehensibility despite the high complexity of contents and the achievement of acceptable results in school in situations of ever-growing diversity. This opens up new research areas for linguistics: on the one hand, the communicative acts of members of a language community in everyday life and in specialized settings; on the other hand, the variable contexts of the speech acts, which require the co-orientation of social actors, which in turn also needs to be acquired and practiced like the languages with their formal and structural characteristics. Based upon these premises, this volume presents findings and theoretical approaches which make corpus findings available for the study and the didactics of language teaching concerning the the three school languages ??of German, Italian and English. Special emphasis is put on the varieties of the German language in South Tyrol and the interface problem.Die Vermittlung von Wissen steht heute vor einer zweifachen Herausforderung: dem Anspruch auf Verständlichkeit trotz hoher Komplexität der Inhalte und dem Erreichen akzeptabler Ergebnisse in der Schule in Situationen von immer größerer Diversität. Daraus ergeben sich für die Sprachwissenschaft neue Schwerpunkte: eine konstante Besinnung auf die Phänomene, das sind die kommunikativen Akte von Mitgliedern einer Sprachgemeinschaft im Alltag und in Bereichen fachlicher Spezialisierung, das sind aber auch variable Kontexte der Sprechakte, die eine Koorientierung der sozialen Akteure verlangen, die ebenso gelernt und geübt werden muss, wie die Sprachen in ihren formalen und strukturellen Eigenheiten. In diesem Band werden Forschungen und theoretische Ansätze vorgelegt, die ausgehend von diesen Prämissen Korpusrecherchen für die Erforschung und für die didaktische Vermittlung der drei Schulsprachen Deutsch, Italienisch und Englisch nutzbar machen. Besondere Schwerpunkte sind Varietäten der deutschen Sprache in Südtirol und die Interface-Problematik