Miriam Butt

The Parallel Grammar project

We report on the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project which uses the XLE parser and grammar development platform for six languages: English, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, and Urdu.

The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors

Event structure in argument linking Deconstructing the lexicon Building verb meanings Delimiting events in syntax Strong and weak projection: Lexical reflexives and reciprocals Voice and transitivity as functional projections in Yaqui Noun incorporating verbs in West Greenlandic Partitive case and aspect Scrambling and the PF interface.

Urdu in a parallel grammar development environment

In this paper, we report on the role of the Urdu grammar in the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project (Butt, M., King, T. H., Niño, M.-E., & Segond, F. (1999). A grammar writer’s cookbook. CSLI Publications; Butt, M., Dyvik, H., King, T. H., Masuichi, H., & Rohrer, C. (2002). ‘The parallel grammar project’. In: Proceedings of COLING 2002, Workshop on grammar engineering and evaluation, pp. 1–7). The Urdu grammar was able to take advantage of standards in analyses set by the original grammars in order to speed development. However, novel constructions, such as correlatives and extensive complex predicates, resulted in expansions of the analysis feature space as well as extensions to the underlying parsing platform. These improvements are now available to all the project grammars.

Urdu and the Parallel Grammar project

We report on the role of the Urdu grammar in the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project (Butt et al., 1999; Butt et al., 2002). The ParGram project was designed to use a single grammar development platform and a unified methodology of grammar writing to develop large-scale grammars for typologically different languages. At the beginning of the project, three typologically similar European grammars were implemented. The addition of two Asian languages, Urdu and Japanese, has shown that the basic analysis decisions made for the European languages can be applied to typologically distinct languages. However, the Asian languages required the addition of a small number of new standard analyses to cover constructions and analysis techniques not found in the European languages. With these additional standards, the ParGram project can now be applied to other typologically distinct languages.

Comparative Visual Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Features

Approaches in Visual Analytics have so far been developed for a wide array of research areas, mainly with a focus on industrial or business applications. The field of linguistics, however, has only marginally incorporated visualizations in its research, e.g. using simple tree representations, attribute-value matrices or network analyses. This paper suggests a new interesting field of application demonstrating how Visual Analytics is able to support linguists in their research. We show this with respect to one concrete linguistic phenomenon, named Vowel Harmony, where visual analysis allows an at-a-glance comparison across a variety of languages. Our approach covers the entire pipeline of Visual Analytics methodology: data processing, feature extraction and the creation of an interactive visual representation. Our results allow for a novel approach to linguistic investigation in that we enable an at-a-glance analysis of whether vowel harmony is present in a language and, beyond that, a precise indication of the particular type of vowel interdependence and patterning in a given language.

Visual linguistic analysis of political discussions: Measuring deliberative quality

This article reports on a Digital Humanities research project which is concerned with the automated linguistic and visual analysis of political discourses with a particular focus on the concept of deliberative communication. According to the theory of deliberative communication as discussed within political science, political debates should be inclusive and stakeholders participating in these debates are required to justify their positions rationally and respectfully and should eventually defer to the better argument. The focus of the article is on the novel interactive visualizations that combine linguistic and statistical cues to analyze the deliberative quality of communication automatically. In particular, we quantify the degree of deliberation for four dimensions of communication: Participation, Respect, Argumentation and Justification, and Persuasiveness. Yet, these four dimensions have not been linked within a combined linguistic and visual framework, but each single dimension helps determining the degree of deliberation independently from each other. Since at its core, deliberation requires sustained and appropriate modes of communication, our main contribution is the automatic annotation and disambiguation of causal connectors and discourse particles.

Automatic Detection of Causal Relations in German Multilogs

This paper introduces a linguisticallymotivated, rule-based annotation system for causal discourse relations in transcripts of spoken multilogs in German. The overall aim is an automatic means of determining the degree of justification provided by a speaker in the delivery of an argument in a multiparty discussion. The system comprises of two parts: A disambiguation module which differentiates causal connectors from their other senses, and a discourse relation annotation system which marks the spans of text that constitute the reason and the result/conclusion expressed by the causal relation. The system is evaluated against a gold standard of German transcribed spoken dialogue. The results show that our system performs reliably well with respect to both tasks.

Syntactic analyses for parallel grammars: auxiliaries and genitive NPs

This paper focuses on two disparate aspects of German syntax from the perspective of parallel grammar development. As part of a cooperative project, we present an innovative approach to auxiliaries and multiple genitive NPs in German. The LFG-based implementation presented here avoids unnessary structural complexity in the representation of auxiliaries by challenging the traditional analysis of auxiliaries as raising verbs. The approach developed for multiple genitive NPs provides a more abstract, language independent representation of genitives associated with nominalized verbs. Taken together, the two approaches represent a step towards providing uniformly applicable treatments for differing languages, thus lightening the burden for machine translation.

Interactive Visual Analysis of Transcribed Multi-Party Discourse.

We present the first web-based Visual Analytics framework for the analysis of multi-party discourse data using verbatim text transcripts. Our framework supports a broad range of server-based processing steps, ranging from data mining and statistical analysis to deep linguistic parsing of English and German. On the client-side, browser-based Visual Analytics components enable multiple perspectives on the analyzed data. These interactive visualizations allow exploratory content analysis, argumentation pattern review and speaker interaction modeling.

Transfer I : tense and aspect

Das diesem Bericht zugrundeliegende Forschungsvorhaben wurde mit Mitteln des Bundesministers f ur Forschung und Technologie unter dem FF orderkenn-zeichen 01 IV 101 G geff ordert. Die Verantwortung f ur den Inhalt dieser Arbeit liegt bei der Autorin.