Wojciech Skut

An Annotation Scheme for Free Word Order Languages

We describe an annotation scheme and a tool developed for creating linguistically annotated corpora for non-configurational languages. Since the requirements for such a formalism differ from those posited for configurational languages, several features have been added, influencing the architecture of the scheme. The resulting scheme reflects a stratificational notion of language, and makes only minimal assumptions about the interrelation of the particular representational strata.

Syntactic Annotation of a German Newspaper Corpus

We report on the syntactic annotation of a German newspaper corpus. The annotations consist of context-free structures, additionally allowing crossing branches, with labeled nodes (phrases) and edges (grammatical functions). Furthermore, we present a new, interactive semi-automatic annotation process that allows efficient and reliable annotations. The annotation process is sped up by incrementally presenting structures and by automatically highlighting unreliable assignments.

Automation of treebank annotation

This paper describes applications of stochastic and symbolic NLP methods to treebank annotation. In particular we focus on (1) the automation of treebank annotation, (2) the comparison of conflicting annotations for the same sentence and (3) the automatic detection of inconsistencies. These techniques are currently employed for building a German treebank.

Studien zur performanzorientierten Linguistik

SummaryLooking at relative clause extraposition in German as a concrete example, the paper demonstrates how linguistic model building, corpus study and psycholinguistic experiments combine into an integrational research programme that aims at an improved understanding and linguistically as well as cognitively adequate modelling of human language performance. Starting from the word order theory articulated by (Hawkins, 1994), we formulate hypotheses on the positional distribution of relative clauses and evaluate them on the basis of data drawn from corpus analyses and acceptability experiments. Our empirical studies confirm the expectation that grammatical weight has a significant effect on relative clause distribution; at the same time, there is an interesting asymmetry between language production and perception data.ZusammenfassungAm Beispiel der Relativsatzextraposition im Deutschen zeigt der Beitrag, wie Verfahren der sprachwissenschaftlichen Modellbildung, korpuslinguistischen Untersuchung und des psycholinguistischen Experiments in einem integrativen Forschungsansatz zusammenwirken, der auf ein verbessertes Verständnis und die linguistisch wie kognitiv adäquate Modellierung sprachlicher Performanzprobleme zielt. Ausgehend von der von Hawkins (1994) formulierten Theorie zur Wortstellung werden Hypothesen über die positionelle Verteilung von Relativsätzen formuliert und in Bezug auf Korpusdaten und Akzeptabilitätsmessungen überprüft. Alle beschriebenen empirischen Untersuchungen bestätigen den erwarteten Einfluß von Längenfaktoren auf die Relativsatzdistribution, zeigen gleichzeitig aber eine interessante Asymmetrie zwischen Produktionsund Rezeptionsdaten.

A bimachine compiler for ranked tagging rules

This paper describes a novel method of compiling ranked tagging rules into a deterministic finite-state device called a bimachine. The rules are formulated in the framework of regular rewrite operations and allow unrestricted regular expressions in both left and right rule contexts. The compiler is illustrated by an application within a speech synthesis system.

A Flexible Rule Compiler for Speech Synthesis

We present a flexible rule compiler developed for a text-to-speech (TTS) system. The compiler converts a set of rules into a finite-state transducer (FST). The input and output of the FST are subject to parameterization, so that the system can be applied to strings and sequences of feature-structures. The resulting transducer is guaranteed to realize a function (as opposed to a relation), and therefore can be implemented as a deterministic device (either a deterministic FST or a bimachine).

Incremental construction of minimal acyclic sequential transducers from unsorted data

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the incremental construction of a minimal acyclic sequential transducer (ST) for a dictionary consisting of a list of input and output strings. The algorithm generalises a known method of constructing minimal finite-state automata (Daciuk et al., 2000). Unlike the algorithm published by Mihov and Maurel (2001), it does not require the input strings to be sorted. The new method is illustrated by an application to pronunciation dictionaries.

Software for Annotating Argument Structure

We present a tool developed for annotating corpora with argument structure representations. The presentation focuses on the architecture of the annotation scheme and a number of techniques for increasing the efficiency and accuracy of annotation. Among others, we show how the assignment of grammatical functions can be automatised using standard part-of-speech tagging methods.

Studien zur performanzorientierten LinguistikStudies in Performance-Oriented Linguistics: Aspects of German Relative Clause Extraposition

SummaryLooking at relative clause extraposition in German as a concrete example, the paper demonstrates how linguistic model building, corpus study and psycholinguistic experiments combine into an integrational research programme that aims at an improved understanding and linguistically as well as cognitively adequate modelling of human language performance. Starting from the word order theory articulated by (Hawkins, 1994), we formulate hypotheses on the positional distribution of relative clauses and evaluate them on the basis of data drawn from corpus analyses and acceptability experiments. Our empirical studies confirm the expectation that grammatical weight has a significant effect on relative clause distribution; at the same time, there is an interesting asymmetry between language production and perception data.ZusammenfassungAm Beispiel der Relativsatzextraposition im Deutschen zeigt der Beitrag, wie Verfahren der sprachwissenschaftlichen Modellbildung, korpuslinguistischen Untersuchung und des psycholinguistischen Experiments in einem integrativen Forschungsansatz zusammenwirken, der auf ein verbessertes Verständnis und die linguistisch wie kognitiv adäquate Modellierung sprachlicher Performanzprobleme zielt. Ausgehend von der von Hawkins (1994) formulierten Theorie zur Wortstellung werden Hypothesen über die positionelle Verteilung von Relativsätzen formuliert und in Bezug auf Korpusdaten und Akzeptabilitätsmessungen überprüft. Alle beschriebenen empirischen Untersuchungen bestätigen den erwarteten Einfluß von Längenfaktoren auf die Relativsatzdistribution, zeigen gleichzeitig aber eine interessante Asymmetrie zwischen Produktionsund Rezeptionsdaten.

Studien zur performanzorientierten Linguistik@@@Studies in Performance-Oriented Linguistics: Aspects of German Relative Clause Extraposition: Aspekte der Relativsatzextraposition im Deutschen

SummaryLooking at relative clause extraposition in German as a concrete example, the paper demonstrates how linguistic model building, corpus study and psycholinguistic experiments combine into an integrational research programme that aims at an improved understanding and linguistically as well as cognitively adequate modelling of human language performance. Starting from the word order theory articulated by (Hawkins, 1994), we formulate hypotheses on the positional distribution of relative clauses and evaluate them on the basis of data drawn from corpus analyses and acceptability experiments. Our empirical studies confirm the expectation that grammatical weight has a significant effect on relative clause distribution; at the same time, there is an interesting asymmetry between language production and perception data.ZusammenfassungAm Beispiel der Relativsatzextraposition im Deutschen zeigt der Beitrag, wie Verfahren der sprachwissenschaftlichen Modellbildung, korpuslinguistischen Untersuchung und des psycholinguistischen Experiments in einem integrativen Forschungsansatz zusammenwirken, der auf ein verbessertes Verständnis und die linguistisch wie kognitiv adäquate Modellierung sprachlicher Performanzprobleme zielt. Ausgehend von der von Hawkins (1994) formulierten Theorie zur Wortstellung werden Hypothesen über die positionelle Verteilung von Relativsätzen formuliert und in Bezug auf Korpusdaten und Akzeptabilitätsmessungen überprüft. Alle beschriebenen empirischen Untersuchungen bestätigen den erwarteten Einfluß von Längenfaktoren auf die Relativsatzdistribution, zeigen gleichzeitig aber eine interessante Asymmetrie zwischen Produktionsund Rezeptionsdaten.