Erhard W. Hinrichs

Word Order and Constituent Structure in German

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Is it Really that Difficult to Parse German

This paper presents a comparative study of probabilistic treebank parsing of German, using the Negra and TuBa-D/Z tree-banks. Experiments with the Stanford parser, which uses a factored PCFG and dependency model, show that, contrary to previous claims for other parsers, lexicalization of PCFG models boosts parsing performance for both treebanks. The experiments also show that there is a big difference in parsing performance, when trained on the Negra and on the TuBa-D/Z treebanks. Parser performance for the models trained on TuBa-D/Z are comparable to parsing results for English with the Stanford parser, when trained on the Penn treebank. This comparison at least suggests that German is not harder to parse than its West-Germanic neighbor language English.

Plurality and Quantification

Introduction. Ten Years of Research on Plurals - Where Do We Stand? G. Link. The Influence of Plural NPs on Aktionsart in DRT K. Eberle. Mass Terms and Plurals in Property Theory C. Fox. Three Types of Polarity F. Zwarts. Sums and Quantifiers J. van der Does. Some Issues in the Analysis of Multiple Quantification with Plural NPs H. Verkuyl. Reducing the Coordination of Determiners: Some Principles C. Michaux. Issues on Distributive and Collective Readings J. Peres. Index of Subjects. Index of Names.

A Unified Representation for Morphological, Syntactic, Semantic, and Referential Annotations

This paper reports on the SYN-RA (SYNtax-based Reference Annotation) project, an on-going project of annotating German newspaper texts with referential relations. The project has developed an inventory of anaphoric and coreference relations for German in the context of a unified, XML-based annotation scheme for combining morphological, syntactic, semantic, and anaphoric information. The paper discusses how this unified annotation scheme relates to other formats currently discussed in the literature, in particular the annotation graph model of Bird and Liberman (2001) and the pie-in-the-sky scheme for semantic annotation.

The Tübingen Treebanks for Spoken German, English, and Japanese

The Tubingen treebanks for spoken German, English and Japanese provide linguistic annotations for the Verbmobil dialog corpus of spontaneous speech in the scenarios of appointment negotiations, travel arrangements and personal computer maintenance. The annotation schemes of the Tubingen treebanks have been developed taking into account the specific characteristics of spoken language dialogs: repetitions, hesitations, “false starts”, etc.

Accurate Linear-Time Chinese Word Segmentation via Embedding Matching

This paper proposes an embedding matching approach to Chinese word segmentation, which generalizes the traditional sequence labeling framework and takes advantage of distributed representations. The training and prediction algorithms have linear-time complexity. Based on the proposed model, a greedy segmenter is developed and evaluated on benchmark corpora. Experiments show that our greedy segmenter achieves improved results over previous neural network-based word segmenters, and its performance is competitive with state-of-the-art methods, despite its simple feature set and the absence of external resources for training.

SusTEInability of linguistic resources through feature structures

This article shows that the TEI tag set for feature structures can be adopted to represent a heterogeneous set of linguistic corpora. The majority of corpora is annotated using markup languages that are based on the Annotation Graph framework, the upcoming Linguistic Annotation Format ISO standard, or according to tag sets defined by or based upon the TEI guidelines. A unified representation comprises the separation of conceptually different annotation layers contained in the original corpus data (e.g. syntax, phonology, and semantics) into multiple XML files. These annotation layers are linked to each other implicitly by the identical textual content of all files. A suitable data structure for the representation of these annotations is a multi-rooted tree that again can be represented by the TEI and ISO tag set for feature structures. The mapping process and representational issues are discussed as well as the advantages and drawbacks associated with the use of the TEI tag set for feature structures as a storage and exchange format for linguistically annotated data.

A COMPOSITIONAL SEMANTICS OF TEMPORAL EXPRESSIONS IN ENGLISH

This paper describes a compositional semantics for temporal expressions as part of the meaning representation language (MRL) of the JANUS system, a natural language understanding and generation system under joint development by BBN Laboratoires and the Information Sciences Institute. The analysis is based on a higher order intensional logic described in detail in Hinrichs, Ayuso and Scha (1987). Temporal expressions of English are translated into this language as quantifiers over times which bind temporal indices on predicates. The semantic evaluation of time-dependent predicates is defined relative to a set of discourse contexts, which, following Reichenbach (1947), include the parameters of speech time and reference time. The resulting context-dependent and multi-indexed interpretation of temporal expressions solves a set of well-known problems that arise when traditional systems of tense logic are applied to natural language semantics. Based on the principle of rule-to-rule translation, the compositional nature of the analysis provides a straightforward and well-defined interface between the parsing component and the semantic interpretation component of JANUS.

From Chunks to Function-Argument Structure: A Similarity-Based Approach

Chunk parsing has focused on the recognition of partial constituent structures at the level of individual chunks. Little attention has been paid to the question of how such partial analyses can be combined into larger structures for complete utterances. Such larger structures are not only desirable for a deeper syntactic analysis. They also constitute a necessary prerequisite for assigning function-argument structure.The present paper offers a similarity-based algorithm for assigning functional labels such as subject, object, head, complement, etc. to complete syntactic structures on the basis of prechunked input.The evaluation of the algorithm has concentrated on measuring the quality of functional labels. It was performed on a German and an English treebank using two different annotation schemes at the level of function-argument structure. The results of 89.73 % correct functional labels for German and 90.40 % for English validate the general approach.

Sustainability of annotated resources in linguistics: A web-platform for exploring, querying, and distributing linguistic corpora and other resources

We report on finished work in a project that is concerned with providing methods, tools, best practice guidelines, and solutions for sustainable linguistic resources. The article discusses several general aspects of sustainability and introduces an approach to normalizing corpus data and metadata records. Moreover, the architecture of the sustainability platform implemented by the authors is described.