This paper demonstrates the research potential of a unique European Parliament dataset for register studies, contrastive linguistics, translation and interpreting studies. The dataset consists of parallel data for several European languages, including written source texts and their translations as well as spoken source texts and the transcripts of their simultaneously interpreted versions. The paper presents a cross-linguistic, corpus-based case study on a word formation phenomenon in these European Parliament data that are enriched with various linguistic annotations and metadata as well as with information-theoretic surprisal scores. It addresses the questions of how initialisms are used across languages and production modes in the English and German corpus sections of these European Parliament data, whether there is a correlation between the use of initialisms and the use of their corresponding multiword full forms in the analysed corpus sections and what insights on the informativity and possible processing difficulties of initialisms we can gain from an analysis of information-theoretic surprisal values. The results show that English written originals and German translations are the corpus sections with the highest frequencies of initialisms. The majority of cross-language transfer situations lead to fewer initialisms in the target texts than in the source texts. In the English data, there is a positive correlation between the frequency of initialisms and the frequency of the respective full forms. There is a similar correlation in the German data, apart from the interpreted data. Additionally, the results show that initialisms represent peaks of information with regard to their surprisal values within their segments. Particularly the German data show higher surprisal values of initialisms in mediated language than in non-mediated discourse types, which indicates that in German mediated discourse, initialisms tend to be used in less conventionalised textual contexts than in English.

In this paper, we describe the creation and annotation of EPIC UdS, a multilingual corpus of simultaneous interpreting for English, German and Spanish. We give an overview of the comparable and parallel, aligned corpus variants and explore various applications of the corpus. What makes EPIC UdS relevant is that it is one of the rare interpreting corpora that includes transcripts suitable for research on more than one language pair and on interpreting with regard to German. It not only contains transcribed speeches, but also rich metadata and fine-grained linguistic annotations tailored for diverse applications across a broad range of linguistic subfields.

Tracing the influence of individuals or groups in social networks is an increasingly popular task in sociolinguistic studies. While methods to determine someone’s influence in shortterm contexts (e.g., social media, on-line political debates) are widespread, influence in longterm contexts is less investigated and may be harder to capture. We study the diffusion of scientific terms in an English diachronic scientific corpus, applying Hawkes Processes to capture the role of individual scientists as “influencers” or “influencees” in the diffusion of new concepts. Our findings on two major scientific discoveries in chemistry and astronomy of the 18th century reveal that modelling both the introduction and diffusion of scientific terms in a historical corpus as Hawkes Processes allows detecting patterns of influence between authors on a long-term scale.

We present a new, extended version of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), a diachronic corpus of scientific English now covering 300+ years of scientific writing (1665–1996). The corpus comprises 47 837 texts, primarily scientific articles, and is based on publications of the Royal Society of London, mainly its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings. The corpus has been built on the basis of the FAIR principles and is freely available under a Creative Commons license, excluding copy-righted parts. We provide information on how the corpus can be found, the file formats available for download as well as accessibility via a web-based corpus query platform. We show a number of analytic tools that we have implemented for better usability and provide an example of use of the corpus for linguistic analysis as well as examples of subsequent, external uses of earlier releases. We place the RSC against the background of existing English diachronic/scientific corpora, elaborating on its value for linguistic and humanistic study.

The paper showcases the application of word embeddings to change in language use in the domain of science, focusing on the Late Modern English period (17-19th century). Historically, this is the period in which many registers of English developed, including the language of science. Our overarching interest is the linguistic development of scientific writing to a distinctive (group of) register(s). A register is marked not only by the choice of lexical words (discourse domain) but crucially by grammatical choices which indicate style. The focus of the paper is on the latter, tracing words with primarily grammatical functions (function words and some selected, poly-functional word forms) diachronically. To this end, we combine diachronic word embeddings with appropriate visualization and exploratory techniques such as clustering and relative entropy for meaningful aggregation of data and diachronic comparison.