Modeling Communicative Purpose with Functional Style: Corpus and Features for German Genre and Register Analysis

Thomas Haider, Alexis Palmer


Abstract
While there is wide acknowledgement in NLP of the utility of document characterization by genre, it is quite difficult to determine a definitive set of features or even a comprehensive list of genres. This paper addresses both issues. First, with prototype semantics, we develop a hierarchical taxonomy of discourse functions. We implement the taxonomy by developing a new text genre corpus of contemporary German to perform a text based comparative register analysis. Second, we extract a host of style features, both deep and shallow, aiming beyond linguistically motivated features at situational correlates in texts. The feature sets are used for supervised text genre classification, on which our models achieve high accuracy. The combination of the corpus typology and feature sets allows us to characterize types of communicative purpose in a comparative setup, by qualitative interpretation of style feature loadings of a regularized discriminant analysis. Finally, to determine the dependence of genre on topics (which are arguably the distinguishing factor of sub-genre), we compare and combine our style models with Latent Dirichlet Allocation features across different corpus settings with unstable topics.
Anthology ID:
W17-4910
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Julian Brooke, Thamar Solorio, Moshe Koppel
Venue:
Style-Var
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
74–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4910
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-4910
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thomas Haider and Alexis Palmer. 2017. Modeling Communicative Purpose with Functional Style: Corpus and Features for German Genre and Register Analysis. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation, pages 74–84, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Communicative Purpose with Functional Style: Corpus and Features for German Genre and Register Analysis (Haider & Palmer, Style-Var 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4910.pdf