Kerstin Eckart

SdeWaC – A Corpus of Parsable Sentences from the Web

For a number of languages, web crawling allows researchers to collect huge text samples to build corpora. However, only part of the material found on the internet is useful for Natural Language Processing, as e.g. parsers typically cannot handle lists and tables, or very short or very long sentences. There are methods (cf. e.g. [3]) for cleaning the downloaded data before adding it to a corpus collection – but even when these are applied, not all remaining textual material might be suitable for certain research requirements. This paper describes methods utilized to prepare deWaC, a freely available German web corpus of the WaCky project, for automatic processing up to the parsing level. It then discusses ways in which this corpus, called SdeWaC, has been used since its release.

A Discourse Information Radio News Database for Linguistic Analysis

In this paper we present DIRNDL, an annotated corpus resource comprising syntactic annotations as well as information status labels and prosodic information. We introduce each annotation layer and then focus on the linking of the data in a standoff approach. The corpus is based on data from radio news broadcasts, i.e. two sets of primary data: spoken radio news files and a written text version which sometimes deviates from the actual spoken data. We utilize a generic relational database management system to bridge the gap between the deviating primary data as well as between the different properties of the annotation levels. We show how the resource can support data extraction concerning the interface between information status, syntax and prosody.

Multi-modal Visualization and Search for Text and Prosody Annotations

We present ICARUS for intonation, an interactive tool to browse and search automatically derived descriptions of fundamental frequency contours. It offers access to tonal features in combination with other annotation layers like part-ofspeech, syntax or coreference and visualizes them in a highly customizable graphical interface with various playback functions. The built-in search allows multilevel queries, the construction of which can be done graphically or textually, and includes the ability to search F0 contours based on various similarity measures.