Publications

Menzel, Katrin; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania

Synthetic and analytic adjective negation in English scientific journal articles: A diachronic perspective Journal Article

In Lege artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow. The journal of University of SS Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, 2022, VII(1), Trnava: University of SS Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, pp. 157-213, 2022, ISSN 2453-8035 .

@article{menzel_2022_diachronicperspective,
title = {Synthetic and analytic adjective negation in English scientific journal articles: A diachronic perspective},
author = {Katrin Menzel and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
pages = {157-213},
publisher = {Trnava: University of SS Cyril and Methodius in Trnava},
volume = {2022, VII(1)},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Talamo, Luigi; Fawzi, M.; Knappen, J.

Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German Inproceedings Forthcoming

LREC 2022, Marseille, France, 2022.

@inproceedings{Fawzi_2022_Syntactic,
title = {Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German},
author = {Marie-Pauline Krielke and Luigi Talamo andM. Fawzi and J. Knappen},
url = {https://lrec2022.lrec-conf.org/en/?msclkid=daf2b7e9c0e011ec9f5e548d0b8ea2f3},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
publisher = {LREC 2022},
address = {Marseille, France},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Menzel, Katrin

Medical discourse in Late Modern English: Insights from the Royal Society Corpus. Book Chapter

Hiltunen, Turo; Taavitsainen, Irma;  (Ed.): Corpus pragmatic studies on the history of medical discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; Vol. 330), John Benjamins, pp. 79-104, Amsterdam, 2022.

This chapter demonstrates how the Royal Society Corpus, a richly annotated corpus of around 48,000 English scientific journal articles covering more than 330 years, can be used for lexico-grammatical and pragmatic studies that contribute to a broader understanding of the development of medical research articles. The Late Modern English period together with several decades before and after this time frame was a productive period in the medical output of the Royal Society. This chapter addresses typical linguistic features of scientific journal articles from medical and related sciences from this period demonstrating their special status in the context of other traditional and emerging disciplines in the corpus data. Additionally, language usage and text-type conventions of historical medical research articles will be compared to the features of corpus texts on medical topics from Present-day English.

@inbook{MedicalDiscourse22,
title = {Medical discourse in Late Modern English: Insights from the Royal Society Corpus.},
author = {Katrin Menzel},
editor = {Turo Hiltunen and Irma Taavitsainen},
url = {https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.330},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Corpus pragmatic studies on the history of medical discourse (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series; Vol. 330)},
pages = {79-104},
publisher = {John Benjamins},
address = {Amsterdam},
abstract = {This chapter demonstrates how the Royal Society Corpus, a richly annotated corpus of around 48,000 English scientific journal articles covering more than 330 years, can be used for lexico-grammatical and pragmatic studies that contribute to a broader understanding of the development of medical research articles. The Late Modern English period together with several decades before and after this time frame was a productive period in the medical output of the Royal Society. This chapter addresses typical linguistic features of scientific journal articles from medical and related sciences from this period demonstrating their special status in the context of other traditional and emerging disciplines in the corpus data. Additionally, language usage and text-type conventions of historical medical research articles will be compared to the features of corpus texts on medical topics from Present-day English.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inbook}
}

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Project:   B1

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania

Measuring informativity: The rise of compounds as informationally dense structures in 20th century Scientific English Book Chapter

Soave, Elena; Biber, Douglas (Ed.): Corpus Approaches to Register Variation, Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 103, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 291-312, 2021.

By applying data-driven methods based on information theory, this study adds to previous work on the development of the scientific register by measuring the informativity of alternative phrasal structures shown to be involved in change in language use in 20th-century Scientific English. The analysis based on data-driven periodization shows compounds to be distinctive grammatical structures from the 1920s onwards in Proceedings A of the Royal Society of London. Compounds not only increase in frequency, but also show higher informativity than their less dense prepositional counterparts. Results also show that the lower the informativity of particular items, the more alternative, more informationally dense options might be favoured (e.g., of-phrases vs. compounds) – striving for communicative efficiency thus being one force shaping the scientific register.

@inbook{Degaetano-Ortlieb2021,
title = {Measuring informativity: The rise of compounds as informationally dense structures in 20th century Scientific English},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb},
editor = {Elena Soave and Douglas Biber},
url = {https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.103.11deg},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.103.11deg},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
booktitle = {Corpus Approaches to Register Variation},
pages = {291-312},
publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Company},
abstract = {By applying data-driven methods based on information theory, this study adds to previous work on the development of the scientific register by measuring the informativity of alternative phrasal structures shown to be involved in change in language use in 20th-century Scientific English. The analysis based on data-driven periodization shows compounds to be distinctive grammatical structures from the 1920s onwards in Proceedings A of the Royal Society of London. Compounds not only increase in frequency, but also show higher informativity than their less dense prepositional counterparts. Results also show that the lower the informativity of particular items, the more alternative, more informationally dense options might be favoured (e.g., of-phrases vs. compounds) – striving for communicative efficiency thus being one force shaping the scientific register.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inbook}
}

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Project:   B1

Bizzoni, Yuri; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Menzel, Katrin; Teich, Elke

The diffusion of scientific terms - tracing individuals' influence in the history of science for English Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 120-127, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online), 2021.

Tracing the influence of individuals or groups in social networks is an increasingly popular task in sociolinguistic studies. While methods to determine someone’s influence in shortterm contexts (e.g., social media, on-line political debates) are widespread, influence in longterm contexts is less investigated and may be harder to capture. We study the diffusion of scientific terms in an English diachronic scientific corpus, applying Hawkes Processes to capture the role of individual scientists as „influencers“ or „influencees“ in the diffusion of new concepts. Our findings on two major scientific discoveries in chemistry and astronomy of the 18th century reveal that modelling both the introduction and diffusion of scientific terms in a historical corpus as Hawkes Processes allows detecting patterns of influence between authors on a long-term scale.

@inproceedings{bizzoni-etal-2021-diffusion,
title = {The diffusion of scientific terms - tracing individuals' influence in the history of science for English},
author = {Yuri Bizzoni and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Katrin Menzel and Elke Teich},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.latechclfl-1.14},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.latechclfl-1.14},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-11-30},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature},
pages = {120-127},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online)},
abstract = {Tracing the influence of individuals or groups in social networks is an increasingly popular task in sociolinguistic studies. While methods to determine someone's influence in shortterm contexts (e.g., social media, on-line political debates) are widespread, influence in longterm contexts is less investigated and may be harder to capture. We study the diffusion of scientific terms in an English diachronic scientific corpus, applying Hawkes Processes to capture the role of individual scientists as "influencers" or "influencees" in the diffusion of new concepts. Our findings on two major scientific discoveries in chemistry and astronomy of the 18th century reveal that modelling both the introduction and diffusion of scientific terms in a historical corpus as Hawkes Processes allows detecting patterns of influence between authors on a long-term scale.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Menzel, Katrin; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania

Structural complexity in scientific journal articles across time - from negative clausal expressions towards adjectival negative prefixes Inproceedings

Workshop on Complexity and Register (CAR21), Berlin, Germany, CRC1412 Register, 2021.

@inproceedings{Menzel-etal2021,
title = {Structural complexity in scientific journal articles across time - from negative clausal expressions towards adjectival negative prefixes},
author = {Katrin Menzel and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-11-19},
booktitle = {Workshop on Complexity and Register (CAR21)},
address = {Berlin, Germany, CRC1412 Register},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Menzel, Katrin

Scientific Eponyms throughout the History of English Scholarly Journal Articles Book Chapter

Van de Velde, Hans; Dolezal, Fredric T.;  (Ed.): Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 159-193, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2021, ISBN 1-5275-7432-6.

@inbook{Menzel2021_eponyms,
title = {Scientific Eponyms throughout the History of English Scholarly Journal Articles},
author = {Katrin Menzel},
editor = {Hans Van de Velde and Fredric T. Dolezal},
url = {https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-7432-8},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-11-08},
booktitle = {Broadening Perspectives in the History of Dictionaries and Word Studies},
isbn = {1-5275-7432-6},
pages = {159-193},
publisher = {Cambridge Scholars Publishing},
address = {Newcastle upon Tyne},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inbook}
}

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Project:   B1

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Säily, Tanja; Bizzoni, Yuri

Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition Journal Article

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, section Language and Computation, 4, pp. 56, 2021.

@article{Degaetano-Ortlieb2021,
title = {Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Tanja S{\"a}ily and Yuri Bizzoni},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frai.2021.609970},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2021.609970},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
journal = {Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, section Language and Computation},
pages = {56},
volume = {4},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Krielke, Marie-Pauline

Relativizers as markers of grammatical complexity: A diachronic, cross-register study of English and German Journal Article

Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies, 11, pp. 91-120, 2021.

In this paper, we investigate grammatical complexity as a register feature of scientific English and German. Specifically, we carry out a diachronic comparison between general and scientific discourse in the two languages from the 17th to the 19th century, using relativizers as proxies for grammatical complexity. We ground our study in register theory (Halliday and Hasan, 1985), assuming that language use reflects contextual factors, which contribute to the formation of registers (Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1999; Teich et al., 2016). Our findings show a clear tendency towards grammatical simplification in scientific discourse in both languages with English spearheading the trend early on and German following later.

@article{Krielke2021relativizers,
title = {Relativizers as markers of grammatical complexity: A diachronic, cross-register study of English and German},
author = {Marie-Pauline Krielke},
url = {https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v11i1.3440},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v11i1.3440},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-09-15},
journal = {Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies},
pages = {91-120},
volume = {11},
number = {1},
abstract = {In this paper, we investigate grammatical complexity as a register feature of scientific English and German. Specifically, we carry out a diachronic comparison between general and scientific discourse in the two languages from the 17th to the 19th century, using relativizers as proxies for grammatical complexity. We ground our study in register theory (Halliday and Hasan, 1985), assuming that language use reflects contextual factors, which contribute to the formation of registers (Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1999; Teich et al., 2016). Our findings show a clear tendency towards grammatical simplification in scientific discourse in both languages with English spearheading the trend early on and German following later.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Menzel, Katrin; Knappen, Jörg; Teich, Elke

Generating linguistically relevant metadata for the Royal Society Corpus Journal Article

Säily, Tanja; Tyrkkö, Jukka (Ed.): Research in Corpus Linguistics, Challenges in combining structured and unstructured data in corpus development (special issue), 9, pp. 1-18, 2021, ISSN 2243-4712.

This paper provides an overview of metadata generation and management for the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), aiming to encourage discussion about the specific challenges in building substantial diachronic corpora intended to be used for linguistic and humanistic analysis. We discuss the motivations and goals of building the corpus, describe its composition and present the types of metadata it contains. Specifically, we tackle two challenges: first, integration of original metadata from the data providers (JSTOR and the Royal Society); second, derivation of additional linguistically relevant metadata regarding text structure and situational context (register).

@article{Menzel2021,
title = {Generating linguistically relevant metadata for the Royal Society Corpus},
author = {Katrin Menzel and J{\"o}rg Knappen and Elke Teich},
editor = {Tanja S{\"a}ily and Jukka Tyrkk{\"o}},
url = {http://ricl.aelinco.es/first-view/158-Article%20Text-969-1-10-20201227.pdf},
doi = {https://doi.org/doi:10.32714/ricl.09.01.02},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
journal = {Research in Corpus Linguistics, Challenges in combining structured and unstructured data in corpus development (special issue)},
pages = {1-18},
volume = {9},
number = {1},
abstract = {This paper provides an overview of metadata generation and management for the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), aiming to encourage discussion about the specific challenges in building substantial diachronic corpora intended to be used for linguistic and humanistic analysis. We discuss the motivations and goals of building the corpus, describe its composition and present the types of metadata it contains. Specifically, we tackle two challenges: first, integration of original metadata from the data providers (JSTOR and the Royal Society); second, derivation of additional linguistically relevant metadata regarding text structure and situational context (register).},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Teich, Elke; Fankhauser, Peter; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Bizzoni, Yuri

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization Journal Article

Benîtez-Burraco, Antonio (Ed.): Frontiers in Communication, section Language Sciences, 2021.

We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of CONVENTIONALIZATION, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and DIVERSIFICATION, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexicalsemantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.

@article{Teich2021,
title = {Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization},
author = {Elke Teich and Peter Fankhauser and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Yuri Bizzoni},
editor = {Antonio Benîtez-Burraco},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.620275/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Communication&id=620275},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.620275},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-01-26},
journal = {Frontiers in Communication, section Language Sciences},
abstract = {We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of CONVENTIONALIZATION, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and DIVERSIFICATION, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexicalsemantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Mosbach, Marius; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Abdullah, Badr M.; Klakow, Dietrich

A Closer Look at Linguistic Knowledge in Masked Language Models: The Case of Relative Clauses in American English Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 771-787, 2020.

Transformer-based language models achieve high performance on various tasks, but we still lack understanding of the kind of linguistic knowledge they learn and rely on. We evaluate three models (BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), testing their grammatical and semantic knowledge by sentence-level probing, diagnostic cases, and masked prediction tasks. We focus on relative clauses (in American English) as a complex phenomenon needing contextual information and antecedent identification to be resolved. Based on a naturalistic dataset, probing shows that all three models indeed capture linguistic knowledge about grammaticality, achieving high performance. Evaluation on diagnostic cases and masked prediction tasks considering fine-grained linguistic knowledge, however, shows pronounced model-specific weaknesses especially on semantic knowledge, strongly impacting models’ performance. Our results highlight the importance of (a) model comparison in evaluation task and (b) building up claims of model performance and the linguistic knowledge they capture beyond purely probing-based evaluations.

@inproceedings{Mosbach2020,
title = {A Closer Look at Linguistic Knowledge in Masked Language Models: The Case of Relative Clauses in American English},
author = {Marius Mosbach and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Badr M. Abdullah and Dietrich Klakow},
url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.coling-main.67.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-12-01},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
pages = {771-787},
abstract = {Transformer-based language models achieve high performance on various tasks, but we still lack understanding of the kind of linguistic knowledge they learn and rely on. We evaluate three models (BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), testing their grammatical and semantic knowledge by sentence-level probing, diagnostic cases, and masked prediction tasks. We focus on relative clauses (in American English) as a complex phenomenon needing contextual information and antecedent identification to be resolved. Based on a naturalistic dataset, probing shows that all three models indeed capture linguistic knowledge about grammaticality, achieving high performance. Evaluation on diagnostic cases and masked prediction tasks considering fine-grained linguistic knowledge, however, shows pronounced model-specific weaknesses especially on semantic knowledge, strongly impacting models’ performance. Our results highlight the importance of (a) model comparison in evaluation task and (b) building up claims of model performance and the linguistic knowledge they capture beyond purely probing-based evaluations.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Projects:   B1 B4 C4

Juzek, Tom; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Teich, Elke

Exploring diachronic syntactic shifts with dependency length: the case of scientific English Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020), Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 109-119, Barcelona, Spain (Online), 2020.

We report on an application of universal dependencies for the study of diachronic shifts in syntactic usage patterns. Our focus is on the evolution of Scientific English in the Late Modern English period (ca. 1700-1900). Our data set is the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), comprising the full set of publications of the Royal Society of London between 1665 and 1996. Our starting assumption is that over time, Scientific English develops specific syntactic choice preferences that increase efficiency in (expert-to-expert) communication. The specific hypothesis we pursue in this paper is that changing syntactic choice preferences lead to greater dependency locality/dependency length minimization, which is associated with positive effects for the efficiency of human as well as computational linguistic processing. As a basis for our measurements, we parsed the RSC using Stanford CoreNLP. Overall, we observe a decrease in dependency length, with long dependency structures becoming less frequent and short dependency structures becoming more frequent over time, notably pertaining to the nominal phrase, thus marking an overall push towards greater communicative efficiency.

@inproceedings{juzek-etal-2020-exploring,
title = {Exploring diachronic syntactic shifts with dependency length: the case of scientific English},
author = {Tom Juzek and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Elke Teich},
url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.udw-1.13},
year = {2020},
date = {2020},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020)},
pages = {109-119},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Barcelona, Spain (Online)},
abstract = {We report on an application of universal dependencies for the study of diachronic shifts in syntactic usage patterns. Our focus is on the evolution of Scientific English in the Late Modern English period (ca. 1700-1900). Our data set is the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), comprising the full set of publications of the Royal Society of London between 1665 and 1996. Our starting assumption is that over time, Scientific English develops specific syntactic choice preferences that increase efficiency in (expert-to-expert) communication. The specific hypothesis we pursue in this paper is that changing syntactic choice preferences lead to greater dependency locality/dependency length minimization, which is associated with positive effects for the efficiency of human as well as computational linguistic processing. As a basis for our measurements, we parsed the RSC using Stanford CoreNLP. Overall, we observe a decrease in dependency length, with long dependency structures becoming less frequent and short dependency structures becoming more frequent over time, notably pertaining to the nominal phrase, thus marking an overall push towards greater communicative efficiency.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Teich, Elke

Language variation and change: A communicative perspective Miscellaneous

Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS 2020, Hamburg, 2020.

@miscellaneous{Teich2020a,
title = {Language variation and change: A communicative perspective},
author = {Elke Teich},
url = {https://www.zfs.uni-hamburg.de/en/dgfs2020/programm.html},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-11-04},
booktitle = {Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft f{\"u}r Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS 2020},
address = {Hamburg},
note = {Key note},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Project:   B1

Fischer, Stefan; Knappen, Jörg; Menzel, Katrin; Teich, Elke

The Royal Society Corpus 6.0: Providing 300+ Years of Scientific Writing for Humanistic Study Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, European Language Resources Association, pp. 794-802, Marseille, France, 2020.

We present a new, extended version of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), a diachronic corpus of scientific English now covering 300+ years of scientific writing (1665–1996). The corpus comprises 47 837 texts, primarily scientific articles, and is based on publications of the Royal Society of London, mainly its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings.

The corpus has been built on the basis of the FAIR principles and is freely available under a Creative Commons license, excluding copy-righted parts. We provide information on how the corpus can be found, the file formats available for download as well as accessibility via a web-based corpus query platform. We show a number of analytic tools that we have implemented for better usability and provide an example of use of the corpus for linguistic analysis as well as examples of subsequent, external uses of earlier releases.

We place the RSC against the background of existing English diachronic/scientific corpora, elaborating on its value for linguistic and humanistic study.

@inproceedings{fischer-EtAl:2020:LREC,
title = {The Royal Society Corpus 6.0: Providing 300+ Years of Scientific Writing for Humanistic Study},
author = {Stefan Fischer and J{\"o}rg Knappen and Katrin Menzel and Elke Teich},
url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.lrec-1.99/},
year = {2020},
date = {2020},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
pages = {794-802},
publisher = {European Language Resources Association},
address = {Marseille, France},
abstract = {We present a new, extended version of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), a diachronic corpus of scientific English now covering 300+ years of scientific writing (1665–1996). The corpus comprises 47 837 texts, primarily scientific articles, and is based on publications of the Royal Society of London, mainly its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings. The corpus has been built on the basis of the FAIR principles and is freely available under a Creative Commons license, excluding copy-righted parts. We provide information on how the corpus can be found, the file formats available for download as well as accessibility via a web-based corpus query platform. We show a number of analytic tools that we have implemented for better usability and provide an example of use of the corpus for linguistic analysis as well as examples of subsequent, external uses of earlier releases. We place the RSC against the background of existing English diachronic/scientific corpora, elaborating on its value for linguistic and humanistic study.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Bizzoni, Yuri; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Fankhauser, Peter; Teich, Elke

Linguistic Variation and Change in 250 years of English Scientific Writing: A Data-driven Approach Journal Article

Jurgens, David (Ed.): Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, section Language and Computation, 2020.

We trace the evolution of Scientific English through the Late Modern period to modern time on the basis of a comprehensive corpus composed of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the first and longest-running English scientific journal established in 1665.

Specifically, we explore the linguistic imprints of specialization and diversification in the science domain which accumulate in the formation of “scientific language” and field-specific sublanguages/registers (chemistry, biology etc.). We pursue an exploratory, data-driven approach using state-of-the-art computational language models and combine them with selected information-theoretic measures (entropy, relative entropy) for comparing models along relevant dimensions of variation (time, register).

Focusing on selected linguistic variables (lexis, grammar), we show how we deploy computational language models for capturing linguistic variation and change and discuss benefits and limitations.

@article{Bizzoni2020b,
title = {Linguistic Variation and Change in 250 years of English Scientific Writing: A Data-driven Approach},
author = {Yuri Bizzoni and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Peter Fankhauser and Elke Teich},
editor = {David Jurgens},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2020.00073/full},
doi = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00073},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-10-18},
journal = {Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, section Language and Computation},
abstract = {We trace the evolution of Scientific English through the Late Modern period to modern time on the basis of a comprehensive corpus composed of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, the first and longest-running English scientific journal established in 1665. Specifically, we explore the linguistic imprints of specialization and diversification in the science domain which accumulate in the formation of “scientific language” and field-specific sublanguages/registers (chemistry, biology etc.). We pursue an exploratory, data-driven approach using state-of-the-art computational language models and combine them with selected information-theoretic measures (entropy, relative entropy) for comparing models along relevant dimensions of variation (time, register). Focusing on selected linguistic variables (lexis, grammar), we show how we deploy computational language models for capturing linguistic variation and change and discuss benefits and limitations.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Juzek, Tom; Fischer, Stefan; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Teich, Elke

Challenges of parsing a historical corpus of Scientific English Miscellaneous

Historical Corpora and Variation (Book of Abstracts), Cagliari, Italy, 2019.

@miscellaneous{Juzek2019a,
title = {Challenges of parsing a historical corpus of Scientific English},
author = {Tom Juzek and Stefan Fischer and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Elke Teich},
url = {https://convegni.unica.it/hicov/files/2019/01/Juzek-et-al.pdf},
year = {2019},
date = {2019},
booktitle = {Historical Corpora and Variation (Book of Abstracts)},
address = {Cagliari, Italy},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Project:   B1

Juzek, Tom; Fischer, Stefan; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Teich, Elke

Annotation quality assessment and error correction in diachronic corpora: Combining pattern-based and machine learning approaches Miscellaneous

52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Book of Abstracts), 2019.

@miscellaneous{Juzek2019,
title = {Annotation quality assessment and error correction in diachronic corpora: Combining pattern-based and machine learning approaches},
author = {Tom Juzek and Stefan Fischer and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Elke Teich},
year = {2019},
date = {2019},
booktitle = {52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Book of Abstracts)},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Project:   B1

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Menzel, Katrin; Teich, Elke

Typical linguistic patterns of English history texts from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century Incollection

Moskowich, Isabel; Crespo, Begoña; Puente-Castelo, Luis; Maria Monaco, Leida (Ed.): Writing History in Late Modern English: Explorations of the Coruña Corpus, John Benjamins, pp. 58-81, Amsterdam, 2019.

@incollection{Degaetano-Ortlieb2019b,
title = {Typical linguistic patterns of English history texts from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Katrin Menzel and Elke Teich},
editor = {Isabel Moskowich and Bego{\~n}a Crespo and Luis Puente-Castelo and Leida Maria Monaco},
url = {https://benjamins.com/catalog/z.225.04deg},
year = {2019},
date = {2019},
booktitle = {Writing History in Late Modern English: Explorations of the Coru{\~n}a Corpus},
pages = {58-81},
publisher = {John Benjamins},
address = {Amsterdam},
pubstate = {published},
type = {incollection}
}

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Project:   B1

Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Fischer, Stefan; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Teich, Elke

System and use of wh-relativizers in 200 years of English scientific writing Miscellaneous

10th International Corpus Linguistics Conference, Cardiff, Wales, UK, 2019.

@miscellaneous{Krielke2019b,
title = {System and use of wh-relativizers in 200 years of English scientific writing},
author = {Marie-Pauline Krielke and Stefan Fischer and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Elke Teich},
url = {https://stefaniadegaetano.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/cl2019_paper_266.pdf},
year = {2019},
date = {2019},
booktitle = {10th International Corpus Linguistics Conference},
address = {Cardiff, Wales, UK},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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