GermaNet is a large lexical-semantic net that relates German nouns, verbs, and adjectives semantically. The word net has been manually constructed over the last 25 years and hence presents a high-quality, valuable resource for German. While GermaNet is maintained in a Postgres database, all its content can be exported as an XML-based serialisation. Recently, this XML representation has been converted into RDF, largely by staying close to GermaNet’s principle of arrangement where lexunits that share the same meaning are grouped together into so-called synsets. With each lexical unit and synset now globally addressable via a unique resource identifier, it has become much easier to link together GermaNet entries with other lexical and semantic resources. In terms of semantic interoperability, however, the RDF variant of GermaNet leaves much to be desired. In this paper, we describe yet another conversion from GermaNet’s XML representation to RDF. The new conversion makes use of the OntoLex-Lemon ontology, and therefore, presents a decisive step toward a GermaNet representation with a much higher level of semantic interoperability, and which makes it possible to use GermaNet with other wordnets that already support this conceptualisation of lexica.

Adjectives such as heavy (as in heavy rain) and windy (as in windy day) provide possible values for the attributes intensity and climate, respectively. The attributes themselves are not overtly realized and are in this sense implicit. While these attributes can be easily inferred by humans, their automatic classification poses a challenging task for computational models. We present the following contributions: (1) We gain new insights into the attribute selection task for German. More specifically, we develop computational models for this task that are able to generalize to unseen data. Moreover, we show that classification accuracy depends, inter alia, on the degree of polysemy of the lexemes involved, on the generalization potential of the training data and on the degree of semantic transparency of the adjective-noun pairs in question. (2) We provide the first resource for computational and linguistic experiments with German adjective-noun pairs that can be used for attribute selection and related tasks. In order to safeguard against unwelcome memorization effects, we present an automatic data augmentation method based on a lexical resource that can increase the size of the training data to a large extent.

In this paper, we introduce the SORTS Subject-Object Resolution Test Suite of German minimal sentence pairs for model introspection. The full test suite consists of 18,502 transitive clauses with manual annotations of 8 word order patterns, 5 morphological and syntactic and 11 semantic property classes. The test suite has been constructed such that sentences are minimal pairs with respect to a property class. Each property has been selected with a particular focus on its effect on subject-object resolution, the second-most error-prone task within syntactic parsing of German after prepositional phrase attachment (Fischer et al., 2019). The size and detail of annotations make the test suite a valuable resource for natural language processing applications with syntactic and semantic tasks. We use dependency parsing to demonstrate how the test suite allows insights into the process of subject-object resolution. Based on the test suite annotations, word order and case syncretism can be identified as most important factors that affect subject-object resolution.

In this paper we present the GerCo dataset of adjective-noun collocations for German, such as alter Freund ‘old friend’ and tiefe Liebe ‘deep love’. The annotation has been performed by experts based on the annotation scheme introduced in this paper. The resulting dataset contains 4,732 positive and negative instances of collocations and covers all the 16 semantic classes of adjectives as defined in the German wordnet GermaNet. The dataset can serve as a reliable empirical basis for comparing different theoretical frameworks concerned with collocations or as material for data-driven approaches to the studies of collocations including different machine learning experiments. This paper addresses the latter issue by using the GerCo dataset for evaluating different models on the task of automatic collocation identification. We compare lexical association measures with static and contextualized word embeddings. The experiments show that word embeddings outperform methods based on statistical association measures by a wide margin.

Composition models of distributional semantics are used to construct phrase representations from the representations of their words. Composition models are typically situated on two ends of a spectrum. They either have a small number of parameters but compose all phrases in the same way, or they perform word-specific compositions at the cost of a far larger number of parameters. In this paper we propose transformation weighting (TransWeight), a composition model that consistently outperforms existing models on nominal compounds, adjective-noun phrases, and adverb-adjective phrases in English, German, and Dutch. TransWeight drastically reduces the number of parameters needed compared with the best model in the literature by composing similar words in the same way.

GermaNet (Henrich and Hinrichs, 2010; Hamp and Feldweg, 1997) is a comprehensive wordnet of Standard German spoken in the Federal Republic of Germany. The GermaNet team aims at modelling the basic vocabulary of the language. German is an official language or a minority language in many countries. It is an official language in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, each with its own codified standard variety (Auer, 2014, p. 21), and also in Belgium, Liechtenstein, and Luxemburg. German is recognized as a minority language in thirteen additional countries, including Brasil, Italy, Poland, and Russia. However, the different standard varieties of German are currently not represented in GermaNet. With this project, we make a start on changing this by including one variety, namely Swiss Standard German, into GermaNet. This shall give a more inclusive perspective on the German language. We will argue that Swiss Standard German words, Helvetisms, are best included into the already existing wordnet GermaNet, rather than creating them as a separate wordnet.

In this paper we argue that Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982) provides a good framework for semantic modelling of adjective-noun collocations. More specifically, the notion of a frame is rich enough to account for nouns from different semantic classes and to model semantic relations that hold between an adjective and a noun in terms of Frame Elements. We have substantiated these findings by considering a sample of adjective-noun collocations from German such as “enger Freund” ‘close friend’ and “starker Regen” ‘heavy rain’. The data sample is taken from different semantic fields identified in the German wordnet GermaNet (Hamp and Feldweg, 1997; Henrich and Hinrichs, 2010). The study is based on the electronic dictionary DWDS (Klein and Geyken, 2010) and uses the collocation extraction tool Wortprofil (Geyken et al., 2009). The FrameNet modelling is based on the online resource available at http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu. Since FrameNets are available for a range of typologically different languages, it is feasible to extend the current case study to other languages.

We developed two simple systems for dependency parsing: darc, a transition-based parser, and mstnn, a graph-based parser. We tested our systems in the CoNLL 2017 UD Shared Task, with darc being the official system. Darc ranked 12th among 33 systems, just above the baseline. Mstnn had no official ranking, but its main score was above the 27th. In this paper, we describe our two systems, examine their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss the lessons we learned.

Prepostitional phrase (PP) attachment is a well known challenge to parsing. In this paper, we combine the insights of different works, namely: (1) treating PP attachment as a classification task with an arbitrary number of attachment candidates; (2) using auxiliary distributions to augment the data beyond the hand-annotated training set; (3) using topological fields to get information about the distribution of PP attachment throughout clauses and (4) using state-of-the-art techniques such as word embeddings and neural networks. We show that jointly using these techniques leads to substantial improvements. We also conduct a qualitative analysis to gauge where the ceiling of the task is in a realistic setup.

This paper presents a language-independent annotation scheme for the semantic relations that link the constituents of noun-noun compounds, such as Schneemann ‘snow man’ or Milchmann ‘milk man’. The annotation scheme is hybrid in the sense that it assigns each compound a two-place label consisting of a semantic property and a prepositional paraphrase. The resulting inventory combines the insights of previous annotation schemes that rely exclusively on either semantic properties or prepositions, thus avoiding the known weaknesses that result from using only one of the two label types. The proposed annotation scheme has been used to annotate a set of 5112 German noun-noun compounds. A release of the dataset is currently being prepared and will be made available via the CLARIN Center Tübingen. In addition to the presentation of the hybrid annotation scheme, the paper also reports on an inter-annotator agreement study that has resulted in a substantial agreement among annotators.

CLARA (Common Language Resources and Their Applications) is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network which ran from 2009 until 2014 with the aim of providing researcher training in crucial areas related to language resources and infrastructure. The scope of the project was broad and included infrastructure design, lexical semantic modeling, domain modeling, multimedia and multimodal communication, applications, and parsing technologies and grammar models. An international consortium of 9 partners and 12 associate partners employed researchers in 19 new positions and organized a training program consisting of 10 thematic courses and summer/winter schools. The project has resulted in new theoretical insights as well as new resources and tools. Most importantly, the project has trained a new generation of researchers who can perform advanced research and development in language resources and technologies.

CLARIN is the short name for the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, which aims at providing easy and sustainable access for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to digital language data and advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse or combine them, independent of where they are located. CLARIN is in the process of building a networked federation of European data repositories, service centers and centers of expertise, with single sign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participating countries. Tools and data from different centers will be interoperable so that data collections can be combined and tools from different sources can be chained to perform complex operations to support researchers in their work. Interoperability of language resources and tools in the federation of CLARIN Centers is ensured by adherence to TEI and ISO standards for text encoding, by the use of persistent identifiers, and by the observance of common protocols. The purpose of the present paper is to give an overview of language resources, tools, and services that CLARIN presently offers.

The present paper explores a wide range of word sense disambiguation (WSD) algorithms for German. These WSD algorithms are based on a suite of semantic relatedness measures, including path-based, information-content-based, and gloss-based methods. Since the individual algorithms produce diverse results in terms of precision and thus complement each other well in terms of coverage, a set of combined algorithms is investigated and compared in performance to the individual algorithms. Among the single algorithms considered, a word overlap method derived from the Lesk algorithm that uses Wiktionary glosses and GermaNet lexical fields yields the best F-score of 56.36. This result is outperformed by a combined WSD algorithm that uses weighted majority voting and obtains an F-score of 63.59. The WSD experiments utilize the German wordnet GermaNet as a sense inventory as well as WebCAGe (short for: Web-Harvested Corpus Annotated with GermaNet Senses), a newly constructed, sense-annotated corpus for this language. The WSD experiments also confirm that WSD performance is lower for words with fine-grained sense distinctions compared to words with coarse-grained senses.

This paper presents the Tübingen Baumbank des Deutschen Diachron (TüBa-D/DC), a linguistically annotated corpus of selected diachronic materials from the German Gutenberg Project. It was automatically annotated by a suite of NLP tools integrated into WebLicht, the linguistic chaining tool used in CLARIN-D. The annotation quality has been evaluated manually for a subcorpus ranging from Middle High German to Modern High German. The integration of the TüBa-D/DC into the CLARIN-D infrastructure includes metadata provision and harvesting as well as sustainable data storage in the Tübingen CLARIN-D center. The paper further provides an overview of the possibilities of accessing the TüBa-D/DC data. Methods for full-text search of the metadata and object data and for annotation-based search of the object data are described in detail. The WebLicht Service Oriented Architecture is used as an integrated environment for annotation based search of the TüBa-D/DC. WebLicht thus not only serves as the annotation platform for the TüBa-D/DC, but also as a generic user interface for accessing and visualizing it.

Creating and maintaining metadata for various kinds of resources requires appropriate tools to assist the user. The paper presents the metadata editor ProFormA for the creation and editing of CMDI (Component Metadata Infrastructure) metadata in web forms. This editor supports a number of CMDI profiles currently being provided for different types of resources. Since the editor is based on XForms and server-side processing, users can create and modify CMDI files in their standard browser without the need for further processing. Large parts of ProFormA are implemented as web services in order to reuse them in other contexts and programs.

This paper presents the system architecture as well as the underlying workflow of the Extensible Repository System of Digital Objects (ERDO) which has been developed for the sustainable archiving of language resources within the Tübingen CLARIN-D project. In contrast to other approaches focusing on archiving experts, the described workflow can be used by researchers without required knowledge in the field of long-term storage for transferring data from their local file systems into a persistent repository.

This paper introduces GernEdiT (short for: GermaNet Editing Tool), a new graphical user interface for the lexicographers and developers of GermaNet, the German version of the Princeton WordNet. GermaNet is a lexical-semantic net that relates German nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Traditionally, lexicographic work for extending the coverage of GermaNet utilized the Princeton WordNet development environment of lexicographer files. Due to a complex data format and no opportunity of automatic consistency checks, this process was very error prone and time consuming. The GermaNet Editing Tool GernEdiT was developed to overcome these shortcomings. The main purposes of the GernEdiT tool are, besides supporting lexicographers to access, modify, and extend GermaNet data in an easy and adaptive way, as follows: Replace the standard editing tools by a more user-friendly tool, use a relational database as data storage, support export formats in the form of XML, and facilitate internal consistency and correctness of the linguistic resource. All these core functionalities of GernEdiT along with the main aspects of the underlying lexical resource GermaNet and its current database format are presented in this paper.

For researchers, it is especially important that primary research data are preserved and made available on a long-term basis and to a wide variety of researchers. In order to ensure long-term availability of the archived data, it is imperative that the data to be stored is conformant with standardized data formats and best practices followed by the relevant research communities. Storing, managing, and accessing such standard-conformant data requires a repository-based infrastructure. Two projects at the University of Tübingen are realizing a collaborative eScience research environment with the help of eSciDoc for the university that supports long-term preservation of all kinds of data as well as a fine-grained and contextualized data management: the INF project and the BW-eSci(T) project. The task of the infrastructure (INF) project within the collaborative research centre „Emergence of Meaning“ (SFB 833) is to guarantee the long-term availability of the SFBs data. BW-eSci(T) is a joint project of the University of Tübingen and the Fachinformationszentrums (FIZ) Karlsruhe. The goal of this project is to develop a prototypical eScience research environment for the University of Tübingen.

eScience - enhanced science - is a new paradigm of scientific work and research. In the humanities, eScience environments can be helpful in establishing new workflows and lifecycles of scientific data. WebLicht is such an eScience environment for linguistic analysis, making linguistic tools and resources available network-wide. Today, most digital language resources and tools (LRT) are available by download only. This is inconvenient for someone who wants to use and combine several tools because these tools are normally not compatible with each other. To overcome this restriction, WebLicht makes the functionality of linguistic tools and the resources themselves available via the internet as web services. In WebLicht, several kinds of linguistic tools are available which cover the basic functionality of automatic and incremental creation of annotated text corpora. To make use of the more than 70 tools and resources currently available, the end user needs nothing more than just a common web browser.

We present a web service-based environment for the use of linguistic resources and tools to address issues of terminology and language varieties. We discuss the architecture, corpus representation formats, components and a chainer supporting the combination of tools into task-specific services. Integrated into this environment, single web services also become part of complex scenarios for web service use. Our web services take for example corpora of several million words as an input on which they perform preprocessing, such as tokenisation, tagging, lemmatisation and parsing, and corpus exploration, such as collocation extraction and corpus comparison. Here we present an example on extraction of single and multiword items typical of a specific domain or typical of a regional variety of German. We also give a critical review on needs and available functions from a user's point of view. The work presented here is part of ongoing experimentation in the D-SPIN project, the German national counterpart of CLARIN.

In the framework of the preparation of linguistic web services for corpus processing, the need for a representation format was felt, which supports interoperability between different web services in a corpus processing pipeline, but also provides a well-defined interface to both, legacy tools and their data formats and upcoming international standards. We present the D-SPIN text corpus format, TCF, which was designed for this purpose. It is a stand-off XML format, inspired by the philosophy of the emerging standards LAF (Linguistic Annotation Framework) and its ``instances'' MAF for morpho-syntactic annotation and SynAF for syntactic annotation. Tools for the exchange with existing (best practice) formats are available, and a converter from MAF to TCF is being tested in spring 2010. We describe the usage scenario where TCF is embedded and the properties and architecture of TCF. We also give examples of TCF encoded data and describe the aspects of syntactic and semantic interoperability already addressed.

This paper presents a corpus-based study of the discourse connective “in contrast”. The corpus data are drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) and are analyzed at the levels of syntax, discourse structure, and compositional semantics. Following Webber et al. (2003), the paper argues that “in contrast” crucially involves discourse anaphora and, thus, resembles other discourse adverbials such as “then”, “otherwise”, and “nevertheless”. The compositional semantics proposed for other discourse connectives, however, does not straightforwardly generalize to “in contrast”, for which the notions of contrast pairs and contrast properties are essential.

Within the CLARIN e-science infrastructure project it is foreseen to develop a component-based registry for metadata for Language Resources and Language Technology. With this registry it is hoped to overcome the problems of the current available systems with respect to inflexible fixed schema, unsuitable terminology and interoperability problems. The registry will address interoperability needs by refering to a shared vocabulary registered in data category registries as they are suggested by ISO.