Last Monday, I released an updated version of both corpus and visualization tool on the occasion of the DGfS-CL Poster-Session in Frankfurt, where I presented a poster (in German).

The first version had been made available last summer and mentioned on this blog, cf this post: Introducing the German Political Speeches Corpus and Visualization Tool.

For stability, the resource is available at this permanent redirect: http://purl.org/corpus/german-speeches

Description

In case you don’t remember it or never heard of it, here is a brief description:

The resource presented here consists of speeches by the last German …

Document-driven and data-driven, standoff and inline

First of all, the intention of the encoding can be different. Richard Eckart summarizes two main trends: document-driven XML and data-driven XML. While the first uses an « inline approach » and is « usually easily human-readable and meaningful even without the annotations », the latter is « geared towards machine processing and functions like a database record. […] The order of elements often is meaningless. » (Eckart 2008 p. 3)

In fact, several choices of architecture depend on the goal of an annotation using XML. The main division regards standoff and inline XML (also : stand-off and in-line).

The Paula format …

I would like to write a word about the beginnings of computer-aided readability assessment research in Canada during the ‘90s, as they show interesting ways of thinking and measuring the complexity of texts.

Sato-Calibrage

Daoust, Laroche and Ouellet (1997) start from research on readability as it prevailed in the United States : they aim at finding a way to be able to assign a level to texts by linking them to a school level. They assume that the discourses of the school institutions are coherent and that they can be examined as a whole. Among other things, their criteria concern lexical …

How to build an efficient word list ? What are the limits of word frequency measures ? These issues are relevant to readability.

First, a word about the context : word lists are used to find difficulties and to try to improve the teaching material, whereas word frequency is used in psychological linguistics to measure cognitive processing. Thus, this topic deals with education science, psychological linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Coxhead’s Academic Word List

The academic word list by Averil Coxhead is a good example of this approach. He finds that students are not generally familiar with academic vocabulary, giving following examples : substitute …

I am working on the part-of-speech-tagging of the German political speeches corpus, and I would like to get tags from two different kinds of POS-taggers :

• on one hand the TreeTagger, a hidden Markov model tagger which uses statistical rules and decision trees,
• on the other the Stanford POS-Tagger, a bidirectional maximum entropy tagger.

This is easier said than done.

I am using the 2011-05-18 version of the Stanford Tagger with its standard models for German (I don’t know if any of the problems I encountered would be different with a newer or still-to-come version) and the basic …

I am currently working on a resource I would like to introduce : the German Political Speeches Corpus (no acronym apart from GPS). It consists in speeches by the last German Presidents and Chancellors as well as a few ministers, all gathered from official sources.

As far I as know no such corpus was publicly available for German. Most speeches could not be found on Google until today (which is bound to change). It can be freely republished.

The two main corpora (Presidency and Chancellery) are released in XML format basing on raw text and metadata.

There is a series of …

Sometimes you just feel lucky : I was reading the famous article by Charles J. Fillmore, “Corpus linguistics” or “Computer-aided armchair linguistics”, in the proceedings of a Nobel symposium which took place in 1991 (it is known for the introducing descriptions of the armchair and of the corpus linguist who don’t have anything to say to each other) as I decided to read the following article. The title did not seem promising to me, but still, it was written by Halliday :

M.A.K. Halliday, Language as system and language as instance: The corpus as a theoretical construct, pp. 61-77 …

The Falko Project is an error-annotated corpus of German as a foreign language, maintained by the Humboldt Universität Berlin who made it publicly accessible.

Recently a new search engine was made available, practically replacing the old CQP interface. This tool is named ANNIS2 and can handle complex queries on the corpus.

Corpus

There are several subcorpora, and apparently more to come. The texts were written by advanced learners of German. There are most notably summaries (with the original texts and a comparable corpus of summaries written by native-speakers), essays who come from different locations (with the same type of comparable …

I have (say, I crawled two websites and got hold of) two corpora which sometimes focus on the same topics. I would like to try and melt them together in order to build a balanced and coherent corpus. As this is a highly discussed research topic there are plenty of subtle ways to do it.

Still, as I am only at the beginning of my research and as I don’t know how far I am going to go with both corpora I want to keep it simple.

One of the appropriate techniques (if not the best)

I could do …

I would like to build a corpus from a variety of scientific papers of a given field in a given language (german).

The problems of crawling put aside, I wonder if there is a way to do this automatically. All the papers I read deal with hand-collected corpora.

The Open Archive format might be a good workaround (see The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). As far as I know it is well-spread. And there are search engines that look for academic papers and use these metadata.

Among the most popular ones (Google Scholar, Scirus, OAIster), a few seem …