Workshop Proceedings of the 12th edition of the KONVENS conference

The 2014 issue of KONVENS is even more a forum for exchange: its main topic is the interaction between Computational Linguistics and Information Science, and the synergies such interaction, cooperation and integrated views can produce. This topic at the crossroads of different research traditions which deal with natural language as a container of knowledge, and with methods to extract and manage knowledge that is linguistically represented is close to the heart of many researchers at the Institut für Informationswissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie of Universität Hildesheim: it has long been one of the institute’s research topics, and it has received even more attention over the last few years

Devices for Information Presentation in Electronic Dictionaries*

Electronic dictionaries should support dictionary users by giving them guidance in text production and text reception, alongside a user-definable offer of lexicographic data for cognitive purposes. In this article, we sketch the principles of an interactive and dynamic electronic dictionary aimed at text production and text reception guiding users in innovative ways, especially with respect to difficult, complicated or confusing issues. The lexicographer has to do a very careful analysis of the nature of the possible problems to suggest an optimal solution for a specific problem. We are of the opinion that there are numerous complex situations where users need more detailed support than currently available in e-dictionaries, enabling them to make valid and correct choices. For highly complex situations, we suggest guidance through a decision tree-like device. We assume that the solutions proposed here are not specific to one language only but can, after careful analysis, be applied to e-dictionaries in different languages across the world. Keywords: Electronic Dictionaries; User Guidance; Text Production; Text Reception; Dictionary Design, Decision Tree Structure, Copulatives, Kinship Terminology, Information Presentation Device

HiER 2015 - Proceedings des 9. Hildesheimer Evaluierungs- und Retrievalworkshop

Dieser Band fasst die Vorträge des 9. Hildesheimer Evaluierungs- und Retrieval-Workshops (HIER) zusammen, der am 9. und 10. Juli 2015 an der Universität Hildesheim stattfand. Die HIER Workshop-Reihe begann im Jahr 2001 mit dem Ziel, die Forschungsergebnisse der Hildesheimer Informationswissenschaft zu präsentieren und zu diskutieren. Mittlerweile nehmen immer wieder Kooperationspartner von anderen Institutionen teil, was wir sehr begrüßen. HIER schafft auch ein Forum für Systemvorstellungen und praxisorientierte Beiträge

IGGSA Shared Tasks on German Sentiment Analysis (GESTALT)

Ruppenhofer J, Klinger R, Struß JM, Sonntag J, Wiegand M. IGGSA Shared Tasks on German Sentiment Analysis (GESTALT). In: Faaß G, Ruppenhofer J, eds. Workshop Proceedings of the 12th Edition of the KONVENS Conference. Hildesheim, Germany: Universität Heidelberg; 2014: 164-173

From <tiger2/> to ISOTiger – Community Driven Developments for Syntax Annotation in SynAF

International audienceIn 2010, ISO published a standard for syntactic annotation, ISO 24615:2010 (SynAF). Back then, the document specified a comprehensive reference model for the representation of syntactic annotations, but no accompanying XML serialisation. ISO's subcommittee on language resource management (ISO TC 37/SC 4) is working on making the SynAF serialisation ISOTiger an ad-ditional part of the standard. This contribution addresses the current state of development of ISOTiger, along with a number of open issues on which we are seeking community feedback in order to ensure that ISOTiger becomes a useful extension to the SynAF reference model

Lexicography and corpus linguistics

As Firth (1957:11) has rightly stated with his famous sentence: “You shall know a word by the company it keeps”, we need to look at the use of words before we attempt to describe them. A single human, or even a group of expert researchers, cannot be expected to know every use of every word or, more generally, of every linguistic phenomenon produced by all speakers of a language; we thus need to collect samples of language in use (and compile them in a way computationally that they can be studied by humans). It is moreover argued that such empiricism is an adequate practice aiming at widening the lexicographic (and linguistic) horizon, as Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen (2015:2) state: “corpus analyses have documented the existence of linguistic constructs that are not recognized by current linguistic theories”

Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung der Sepedi-Negation für die Lexikographie

So far, Sepedi negations have been considered more from the point of view of lexico­graphical treatment. Theoretical works on Sepedi have been used for this purpose, setting as an objective a neat description of these negations in a (paper) dictionary. This paper is from a different perspective: instead of theoretical works, corpus linguistic methods are used: (1) a Sepedi corpus is examined on the basis of existing descriptions of the occurrences of a relevant verb, looking at its negated forms from a purely prescriptive point of view; (2) a "corpus-driven" strategy is employed, looking only for sequences of negation particles (or morphemes) in order to list occurring con­structions, without taking into account the verbs occurring in them, apart from their endings. The approach in (2) is only intended to show a possible methodology to extend existing theories on occurring negations. We would also like to try to help lexicographers to establish a frequency-based order of entries of possible negation forms in their dictionaries by showing them the number of respective occurrences. As with all corpus linguistic work, however, we must regard corpus evidence not as representative, but as tendencies of language use that can be detected and described. This is especially true for Sepedi, for which only few and small corpora exist. This paper also describes the resources and tools used to create the necessary corpus and also how it was annotated with part of speech and lemmas. Exploring the quality of available Sepedi part-of-speech taggers concerning verbs, negation morphemes and subject concords may be a positive side result.Bisher wurden Sepedi Negationen eher aus der Sicht der lexi­ko­graphischen Behandlung betrachtet. Hierfür wurden theoretische Werke über Sepedi ver­wendet, wobei als Zielsetzung eine saubere Beschreibung dieser Negationen in einem (Papier-)Wör­ter­buch gesetzt wurde. Dieser Beitrag ist aus einer anderen Perspektive: statt theoretischer Werke werden korpuslinguistische Methoden eingesetzt: (1) ein Sepedi Korpus wird auf Basis bestehender Beschrei­bungen zu den Vorkommen eines einschlägigen Verbs untersucht und dabei seine negierten Formen aus rein präskriptiver Sicht betrachtet; (2) wird eine "corpus-driven"-Strategie ein­gesetzt, bei dem nur nach Sequenzen von Negationspartikeln (oder Morphemen) gesucht wird, um vor­kom­mende Konstruktionen auflisten zu können, ohne dabei die dabei vorkommenden Verben — abgesehen von ihrer Endung — zu berücksichtigen. Der Ansatz in (2) soll dabei nur eine mögliche Methodik aufzeigen, um bestehende Theorien über vorkommende Negationen erweitern zu können. Wir möchten auch versuchen, Lexikographen darin zu unterstützen, eine frequenz­basierte Reihen­folge der Einträge möglicher Negationsformen in ihren Wörterbüchern aufzu­stellen, in dem wir ihnen die Anzahl der jeweiligen Okkurrenzen aufzeigen. Wie bei allen korpus­linguis­tischen Arbei­ten müssen wir jedoch Korpusevidenz nicht als repräsentativ ansehen, sondern als Tendenzen des Sprach­gebrauchs, die festgestellt und beschrieben werden können. Dies gilt insbeson­dere für Sepedi, für das nur wenige und kleine Korpora existieren. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt außerdem die Ressourcen und Werkzeuge, die verwendet wurden, um das nötige Kor­pus zu erstellen und auch, wie dieses mit Wortart und Grundformen der Wörter angereichert wurde. Ein Nebenergebnis ist dabei die Unter­suchung der Qualität von verfügbaren Taggern bzgl. Verben, Negationsmorphemen und Kon­gruenzpartikel

A user-oriented approach to evaluation and documentation of a morphological analyzer

This article describes a user-oriented approach to evaluate and extensively document a morphological analyzer with a view to normative descriptions of ISO and EAGLES. While current state-of-the-art work in this field often describes task-based evaluation, our users (supposedly rather NLP non-experts, anonymously using the tool as part of a webservice) expect an extensive documentation of the tool itself, the testsuite that was used to validate it and the results of the validation process. ISO and EAGLES offer a good starting point when attempting to find attributes that are to be evaluated. The documentation introduced in this article describes the analyzer in a way comparable to others by defining its features as attribute-value pairs (encoded in DocBook XML). Furthermore, the evaluation itself and its results are described

The verbal phrase of Northern Sotho: A morpho-syntactic perspective

So far, comprehensive grammar descriptions of Northern Sotho have only been available in the form of prescriptive books aiming at teaching the language. This paper describes parts of the first morpho-syntactic description of Northern Sotho from a computational perspective (Faaß, 2010a). Such a description is necessary for implementing rule based, operational grammars. It is also essential for the annotation of training data to be utilised by statistical parsers. The work that we partially present here may hence provide a resource for computational processing of the language in order to proceed with producing linguistic representations beyond tagging, may it be chunking or parsing. The paper begins with describing significant Northern Sotho verbal morpho-syntactics (section 2). It is shown that the topology of the verb can be depicted as a slot system which may form the basis for computational processing (section 3). Note that the implementation of the described rules (section 4) and also coverage tests are ongoing processes upon that we will report in more detail at a later stage