Nils Diewald

Web-based Annotation of Anaphoric Relations and Lexical Chains

Annotating large text corpora is a time-consuming effort. Although single-user annotation tools are available, web-based annotation applications allow for distributed annotation and file access from different locations. In this paper we present the web-based annotation application Serengeti for annotating anaphoric relations which will be extended for the annotation of lexical chains.

Geography of social ontologies: Testing a variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the context of Wikipedia

In this article, we test a variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the area of complex network theory. This is done by analyzing social ontologies as a new resource for automatic language classification. Our method is to solely explore structural features of social ontologies in order to predict family resemblances of languages used by the corresponding communities to build these ontologies. This approach is based on a reformulation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in terms of distributed cognition. Starting from a corpus of 160 Wikipedia-based social ontologies, we test our variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by several experiments, and find out that we outperform the corresponding baselines. All in all, the article develops an approach to classify linguistic networks of tens of thousands of vertices by exploring a small range of mathematically well-established topological indices.

Markup Infrastructure for the Anaphoric Bank: Supporting Web Collaboration

Modern NLP systems rely either on unsupervised methods, or on data created as part of governmental initiatives such as MUC, ACE, or GALE. The data created in these efforts tend to be annotated according to task-specific schemes. The Anaphoric Bank is an attempt to create large quantities of data annotated with anaphoric information according to a general purpose and linguistically motivated scheme. We do this by pooling smaller amounts of data annotated according to rich schemes that are by and large compatible, and by taking advantage of Web collaboration. In this chapter we discuss the markup infrastructure that underpins the two modalities of Web collaboration in the project: expert annotation and game-based annotation.

Evolution of Romance Language in Written Communication: Network Analysis of Late Latin and Early Romance Corpora

In this paper, the authors induce linguistic networks as a prerequisite for detecting language change by means of the Patrologia Latina, a corpus of Latin texts from the 4th to the 13th century.

Considerations for a Linguistic Network Markup Language

As the previous chapters have shown, the possible ways of representing linguistic data as a graph are as diverse as the data itself. For the process of graph modeling, the decision as to what information will be represented as nodes and what information as relations is of great importance. In addition, what kind of added value is going to be expected by the representation of the data as a graph and what kinds of scientific questions should be answerable by the model.