Publications

SFB 1102Publications
Lemke, Tyll Robin; Horch, Eva; Reich, Ingo

Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 131-135, Valencia, Spain, 2017.

In this paper we pursue the hypothesis that the distribution of article omission specifically is constrained by principles of Information Theory (Shannon 1948). In particular, Information Theory predicts a stronger preference for article omission before nouns which are relatively unpredictable in context of the preceding words. We investigated article omission in German newspaper headlines with a corpus and acceptability rating study. Both support our hypothesis: Articles are inserted more often before unpredictable nouns and subjects perceive article omission before predictable nouns as more well-formed than before unpredictable ones. This suggests that information theoretic principles constrain the distribution of article omission in headlines.

@inproceedings{LemkeHorchReich:17,
title = {Optimal encoding! - Information Theory constrains article omission in newspaper headlines},
author = {Tyll Robin Lemke and Eva Horch and Ingo Reich},
url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E17-2021},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers},
pages = {131-135},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Valencia, Spain},
abstract = {In this paper we pursue the hypothesis that the distribution of article omission specifically is constrained by principles of Information Theory (Shannon 1948). In particular, Information Theory predicts a stronger preference for article omission before nouns which are relatively unpredictable in context of the preceding words. We investigated article omission in German newspaper headlines with a corpus and acceptability rating study. Both support our hypothesis: Articles are inserted more often before unpredictable nouns and subjects perceive article omission before predictable nouns as more well-formed than before unpredictable ones. This suggests that information theoretic principles constrain the distribution of article omission in headlines.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B3

Lemke, Tyll Robin

Sentential or not? - An experimental investigation on the syntax of fragments Inproceedings

Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2016, Tübingen, 2017.
This paper presents four experiments on the syntactic structure of fragments, i.e. nonsentential utterances with propositional meaning and illocutionary force (Morgan, 1973). The experiments evaluate the predictions of two competing theories of fragments: Merchant’s (2004) movement and deletion account and Barton & Progovac’s (2005) nonsentential account. Experiment 1 provides evidence for case connectivity effects, this suggests that there is indeed unarticulated linguistic structure in fragments (unlike argued by Barton & Progovac 2005). Experiments 2-4 address a central prediction of the movement and deletion account: only those constituents which may appear in the left periphery are possible fragments. Merchant et al. (2013) present two studies on preposition stranding and complement clause topicalization in favor of this. My experiments 2-4 replicate and extend these studies in German and English. Taken together, the acceptability pattern predicted by Merchant (2004) holds only for the preposition stranding data (exp. 2), but not for complement clauses (exp.3) or German multiple prefield constituents (exp.4).

@inproceedings{Lemke-toappear,
title = {Sentential or not? - An experimental investigation on the syntax of fragments},
author = {Tyll Robin Lemke},
url = {https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/77657},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.15496/publikation-19058},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2016},
address = {T{\"u}bingen},
abstract = {

This paper presents four experiments on the syntactic structure of fragments, i.e. nonsentential utterances with propositional meaning and illocutionary force (Morgan, 1973). The experiments evaluate the predictions of two competing theories of fragments: Merchant's (2004) movement and deletion account and Barton & Progovac's (2005) nonsentential account. Experiment 1 provides evidence for case connectivity effects, this suggests that there is indeed unarticulated linguistic structure in fragments (unlike argued by Barton & Progovac 2005). Experiments 2-4 address a central prediction of the movement and deletion account: only those constituents which may appear in the left periphery are possible fragments. Merchant et al. (2013) present two studies on preposition stranding and complement clause topicalization in favor of this. My experiments 2-4 replicate and extend these studies in German and English. Taken together, the acceptability pattern predicted by Merchant (2004) holds only for the preposition stranding data (exp. 2), but not for complement clauses (exp.3) or German multiple prefield constituents (exp.4).
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B3

Reich, Ingo

On the omission of articles and copulae in German newspaper headlines Journal Article

Linguistic Variation, 17, pp. 186-204, 2017.

This paper argues based on a corpus-linguistic study that both omitted articles and copulae in German headlines are to be treated as null elements NA and NC. Both items need to be licensed by a specific (parsing) strategy known as discourse orientation (Huang, 1984), which is also applicable in the special register of headlines. It is shown that distinguishing between discourse and sentence orientation and correlating these two strategies with λ-binding and existential quantification, respectively, naturally accounts for an asymmetry in article omission observed in Stowell (1991).

@article{Reich-inpress,
title = {On the omission of articles and copulae in German newspaper headlines},
author = {Ingo Reich},
url = {https://benjamins.com/catalog/lv.14017.rei},
doi = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14017.rei},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Linguistic Variation},
pages = {186-204},
volume = {17},
number = {2},
abstract = {

This paper argues based on a corpus-linguistic study that both omitted articles and copulae in German headlines are to be treated as null elements NA and NC. Both items need to be licensed by a specific (parsing) strategy known as discourse orientation (Huang, 1984), which is also applicable in the special register of headlines. It is shown that distinguishing between discourse and sentence orientation and correlating these two strategies with λ-binding and existential quantification, respectively, naturally accounts for an asymmetry in article omission observed in Stowell (1991).

},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B3

Hoek, Jet; Scholman, Merel

Evaluating discourse annotation: Some recent insights and new approaches Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13), 2017.

Annotated data is an important resource for the linguistics community, which is why researchers need to be sure that such data are reliable. However, arriving at sufficiently reliable annotations appears to be an issue within the field of discourse, possibly due to the fact that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a textual one. In this paper, we discuss recent insights and developments regarding annotation and reliability evaluation that are relevant to the field of discourse. We focus on characteristics of coherence that impact reliability scores and look at how different measures are affected by this. We discuss benefits and disadvantages of these measures, and propose that discourse annotation results be accompanied by a detailed report of the annotation process and data, as well as a careful consideration of the reliability measure that is applied.

@inproceedings{hoek2017evaluating,
title = {Evaluating discourse annotation: Some recent insights and new approaches},
author = {Jet Hoek and Merel Scholman},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W17-7401},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Joint ISO-ACL Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-13)},
abstract = {Annotated data is an important resource for the linguistics community, which is why researchers need to be sure that such data are reliable. However, arriving at sufficiently reliable annotations appears to be an issue within the field of discourse, possibly due to the fact that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a textual one. In this paper, we discuss recent insights and developments regarding annotation and reliability evaluation that are relevant to the field of discourse. We focus on characteristics of coherence that impact reliability scores and look at how different measures are affected by this. We discuss benefits and disadvantages of these measures, and propose that discourse annotation results be accompanied by a detailed report of the annotation process and data, as well as a careful consideration of the reliability measure that is applied.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B2

Shi, Wei; Yung, Frances Pik Yu; Rubino, Raphael; Demberg, Vera

Using explicit discourse connectives in translation for implicit discourse relation classification Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, pp. 484-495, Taipei, Taiwan, 2017.

Implicit discourse relation recognition is an extremely challenging task due to the lack of indicative connectives. Various neural network architectures have been proposed for this task recently, but most of them suffer from the shortage of labeled data. In this paper, we address this problem by procuring additional training data from parallel corpora: When humans translate a text, they sometimes add connectives (a process known as explicitation). We automatically back-translate it into an English connective and use it to infer a label with high confidence. We show that a training set several times larger than the original training set can be generated this way. With the extra labeled instances, we show that even a simple bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network can outperform the current state-of-the-art.

@inproceedings{Shi2017b,
title = {Using explicit discourse connectives in translation for implicit discourse relation classification},
author = {Wei Shi and Frances Pik Yu Yung and Raphael Rubino and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/I17-1049},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
pages = {484-495},
publisher = {Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing},
address = {Taipei, Taiwan},
abstract = {Implicit discourse relation recognition is an extremely challenging task due to the lack of indicative connectives. Various neural network architectures have been proposed for this task recently, but most of them suffer from the shortage of labeled data. In this paper, we address this problem by procuring additional training data from parallel corpora: When humans translate a text, they sometimes add connectives (a process known as explicitation). We automatically back-translate it into an English connective and use it to infer a label with high confidence. We show that a training set several times larger than the original training set can be generated this way. With the extra labeled instances, we show that even a simple bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network can outperform the current state-of-the-art.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B2

Shi, Wei; Demberg, Vera

On the need of cross validation for discourse relation classification Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 150-156, Valencia, Spain, 2017.

The task of implicit discourse relation classification has received increased attention in recent years, including two CoNNL shared tasks on the topic. Existing machine learning models for the task train on sections 2-21 of the PDTB and test on section 23, which includes a total of 761 implicit discourse relations. In this paper, we{‚}d like to make a methodological point, arguing that the standard test set is too small to draw conclusions about whether the inclusion of certain features constitute a genuine improvement, or whether one got lucky with some properties of the test set, and argue for the adoption of cross validation for the discourse relation classification task by the community.

@inproceedings{Shi2017,
title = {On the need of cross validation for discourse relation classification},
author = {Wei Shi and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/E17-2024},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers},
pages = {150-156},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Valencia, Spain},
abstract = {The task of implicit discourse relation classification has received increased attention in recent years, including two CoNNL shared tasks on the topic. Existing machine learning models for the task train on sections 2-21 of the PDTB and test on section 23, which includes a total of 761 implicit discourse relations. In this paper, we{'}d like to make a methodological point, arguing that the standard test set is too small to draw conclusions about whether the inclusion of certain features constitute a genuine improvement, or whether one got lucky with some properties of the test set, and argue for the adoption of cross validation for the discourse relation classification task by the community.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B2

Scholman, Merel; Rohde, Hannah; Demberg, Vera

"On the one hand" as a cue to anticipate upcoming discourse structure Journal Article

Journal of Memory and Language, 97, pp. 47-60, 2017.

Research has shown that people anticipate upcoming linguistic content, but most work to date has focused on relatively short-range expectation-driven processes within the current sentence or between adjacent sentences. We use the discourse marker On the one hand to test whether comprehenders maintain expectations regarding upcoming content in discourse representations that span multiple sentences. Three experiments show that comprehenders anticipate more than just On the other hand; rather, they keep track of embedded constituents and establish non-local dependencies. Our results show that comprehenders disprefer a subsequent contrast marked with On the other hand when a passage has already provided intervening content that establishes an appropriate contrast with On the one hand. Furthermore, comprehenders maintain their expectation for an upcoming contrast across intervening material, even if the embedded constituent itself contains contrast. The results are taken to support expectation-driven models of processing in which comprehenders posit and maintain structural representations of discourse structure.

@article{Merel2017,
title = {"On the one hand" as a cue to anticipate upcoming discourse structure},
author = {Merel Scholman and Hannah Rohde and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X17300566},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Journal of Memory and Language},
pages = {47-60},
volume = {97},
abstract = {

Research has shown that people anticipate upcoming linguistic content, but most work to date has focused on relatively short-range expectation-driven processes within the current sentence or between adjacent sentences. We use the discourse marker On the one hand to test whether comprehenders maintain expectations regarding upcoming content in discourse representations that span multiple sentences. Three experiments show that comprehenders anticipate more than just On the other hand; rather, they keep track of embedded constituents and establish non-local dependencies. Our results show that comprehenders disprefer a subsequent contrast marked with On the other hand when a passage has already provided intervening content that establishes an appropriate contrast with On the one hand. Furthermore, comprehenders maintain their expectation for an upcoming contrast across intervening material, even if the embedded constituent itself contains contrast. The results are taken to support expectation-driven models of processing in which comprehenders posit and maintain structural representations of discourse structure.

},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B2

Scholman, Merel; Demberg, Vera

Examples and specifications that prove a point: Distinguishing between elaborative and argumentative discourse relations Journal Article

Dialogue and Discourse, 8, pp. 53-86, 2017.
Examples and specifications occur frequently in text, but not much is known about how how readers interpret them. Looking at how they’re annotated in existing discourse corpora, we find that anno-tators often disagree on these types of relations; specifically, there is disagreement about whether these relations are elaborative (additive) or argumentative (pragmatic causal). To investigate how readers interpret examples and specifications, we conducted a crowdsourced discourse annotation study. The results show that these relations can indeed have two functions: they can be used to both illustrate / specify a situation and serve as an argument for a claim. These findings suggest that examples and specifications can have multiple simultaneous readings. We discuss the implications of these results for discourse annotation.

@article{Scholman2017,
title = {Examples and specifications that prove a point: Distinguishing between elaborative and argumentative discourse relations},
author = {Merel Scholman and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318569668_Examples_and_Specifications_that_Prove_a_Point_Identifying_Elaborative_and_Argumentative_Discourse_Relations},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Dialogue and Discourse},
pages = {53-86},
volume = {8},
number = {2},
abstract = {

Examples and specifications occur frequently in text, but not much is known about how how readers interpret them. Looking at how they're annotated in existing discourse corpora, we find that anno-tators often disagree on these types of relations; specifically, there is disagreement about whether these relations are elaborative (additive) or argumentative (pragmatic causal). To investigate how readers interpret examples and specifications, we conducted a crowdsourced discourse annotation study. The results show that these relations can indeed have two functions: they can be used to both illustrate / specify a situation and serve as an argument for a claim. These findings suggest that examples and specifications can have multiple simultaneous readings. We discuss the implications of these results for discourse annotation.
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B2

Scholman, Merel; Demberg, Vera

Crowdsourcing discourse interpretations: On the influence of context and the reliability of a connective insertion task Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 24-33, Valencia, Spain, 2017.

Traditional discourse annotation tasks are considered costly and time-consuming, and the reliability and validity of these tasks is in question. In this paper, we investigate whether crowdsourcing can be used to obtain reliable discourse relation annotations. We also examine the influence of context on the reliability of the data. The results of a crowdsourced connective insertion task showed that the method can be used to obtain reliable annotations: The majority of the inserted connectives converged with the original label. Further, the method is sensitive to the fact that multiple senses can often be inferred for a single relation. Regarding the presence of context, the results show no significant difference in distributions of insertions between conditions overall. However, a by-item comparison revealed several characteristics of segments that determine whether the presence of context makes a difference in annotations. The findings discussed in this paper can be taken as evidence that crowdsourcing can be used as a valuable method to obtain insights into the sense(s) of relations.

@inproceedings{Scholman2017,
title = {Crowdsourcing discourse interpretations: On the influence of context and the reliability of a connective insertion task},
author = {Merel Scholman and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W17-0803},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-0803},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop},
pages = {24-33},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Valencia, Spain},
abstract = {Traditional discourse annotation tasks are considered costly and time-consuming, and the reliability and validity of these tasks is in question. In this paper, we investigate whether crowdsourcing can be used to obtain reliable discourse relation annotations. We also examine the influence of context on the reliability of the data. The results of a crowdsourced connective insertion task showed that the method can be used to obtain reliable annotations: The majority of the inserted connectives converged with the original label. Further, the method is sensitive to the fact that multiple senses can often be inferred for a single relation. Regarding the presence of context, the results show no significant difference in distributions of insertions between conditions overall. However, a by-item comparison revealed several characteristics of segments that determine whether the presence of context makes a difference in annotations. The findings discussed in this paper can be taken as evidence that crowdsourcing can be used as a valuable method to obtain insights into the sense(s) of relations.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B2

Rutherford, Attapol; Demberg, Vera; Xue, Nianwen

A systematic study of neural discourse models for implicit discourse relation Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long PapersDialogue and Discourse, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 281-291, Valencia, Spain, 2017.

Inferring implicit discourse relations in natural language text is the most difficult subtask in discourse parsing. Many neural network models have been proposed to tackle this problem. However, the comparison for this task is not unified, so we could hardly draw clear conclusions about the effectiveness of various architectures. Here, we propose neural network models that are based on feedforward and long-short term memory architecture and systematically study the effects of varying structures. To our surprise, the best-configured feedforward architecture outperforms LSTM-based model in most cases despite thorough tuning. Further, we compare our best feedforward system with competitive convolutional and recurrent networks and find that feedforward can actually be more effective. For the first time for this task, we compile and publish outputs from previous neural and non-neural systems to establish the standard for further comparison.

@inproceedings{Rutherford2017,
title = {A systematic study of neural discourse models for implicit discourse relation},
author = {Attapol Rutherford and Vera Demberg and Nianwen Xue},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/E17-1027},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers},
pages = {281-291},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Valencia, Spain},
abstract = {Inferring implicit discourse relations in natural language text is the most difficult subtask in discourse parsing. Many neural network models have been proposed to tackle this problem. However, the comparison for this task is not unified, so we could hardly draw clear conclusions about the effectiveness of various architectures. Here, we propose neural network models that are based on feedforward and long-short term memory architecture and systematically study the effects of varying structures. To our surprise, the best-configured feedforward architecture outperforms LSTM-based model in most cases despite thorough tuning. Further, we compare our best feedforward system with competitive convolutional and recurrent networks and find that feedforward can actually be more effective. For the first time for this task, we compile and publish outputs from previous neural and non-neural systems to establish the standard for further comparison.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B2

Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline; Hoek, Jet; Scholman, Merel

On temporality in discourse annotation: Theoretical and practical considerations Journal Article

Dialogue and Discourse, 8, pp. 1-20, 2017.
Temporal information is one of the prominent features that determine the coherence in a discourse. That is why we need an adequate way to deal with this type of information during discourse annotation. In this paper, we will argue that temporal order is a relational rather than a segment-specific property, and that it is a cognitively plausible notion: temporal order is expressed in the system of linguistic markers and is relevant in both acquisition and language processing. This means that temporal relations meet the requirements set by the Cognitive approach of Coherence Relations (CCR) to be considered coherence relations, and that CCR would need a way to distinguish temporal relations within its annotation system. We will present merits and drawbacks of different options of reaching this objective and argue in favor of adding temporal order as a new dimension to CCR.

@article{Vermeul2017,
title = {On temporality in discourse annotation: Theoretical and practical considerations},
author = {Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul and Jet Hoek and Merel Scholman},
url = {https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/dad/article/view/10777},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2017.201},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Dialogue and Discourse},
pages = {1-20},
volume = {8},
number = {2},
abstract = {

Temporal information is one of the prominent features that determine the coherence in a discourse. That is why we need an adequate way to deal with this type of information during discourse annotation. In this paper, we will argue that temporal order is a relational rather than a segment-specific property, and that it is a cognitively plausible notion: temporal order is expressed in the system of linguistic markers and is relevant in both acquisition and language processing. This means that temporal relations meet the requirements set by the Cognitive approach of Coherence Relations (CCR) to be considered coherence relations, and that CCR would need a way to distinguish temporal relations within its annotation system. We will present merits and drawbacks of different options of reaching this objective and argue in favor of adding temporal order as a new dimension to CCR.
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B2

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania

Variation in language use across social variables: a data-driven approach Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Conference (CLAVIER), Bari, Italy, 2017.

We present a data-driven approach to study language use over time according to social variables (henceforth SV), considering also interactions between different variables. Besides sociolinguistic studies on language variation according to SVs (e.g., Weinreich et al. 1968, Bernstein 1971, Eckert 1989, Milroy and Milroy 1985), recently computational approaches have gained prominence (see e.g., Eisenstein 2015, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013, and Nguyen et al. 2017 for an overview), not least due to an increase in data availability based on social media and an increasing awareness of the importance of linguistic variation according to SVs in the NLP community.

@inproceedings{Degaetano-Ortlieb2017b,
title = {Variation in language use across social variables: a data-driven approach},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb},
url = {https://stefaniadegaetano.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/clavier2017_slingpro_accepted.pdf},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Conference (CLAVIER)},
address = {Bari, Italy},
abstract = {We present a data-driven approach to study language use over time according to social variables (henceforth SV), considering also interactions between different variables. Besides sociolinguistic studies on language variation according to SVs (e.g., Weinreich et al. 1968, Bernstein 1971, Eckert 1989, Milroy and Milroy 1985), recently computational approaches have gained prominence (see e.g., Eisenstein 2015, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013, and Nguyen et al. 2017 for an overview), not least due to an increase in data availability based on social media and an increasing awareness of the importance of linguistic variation according to SVs in the NLP community.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

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

The course of grammatical change in scientific writing: Interdependency between convention and productivity Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Conference (CLAVIER), Bari, Italy, 2017.

We present an empirical approach to analyze the course of usage change in scientific writing. A great amount of linguistic research has dealt with grammatical changes, showing their gradual course of change, which nearly always progresses stepwise (see e.g. Bybee et al. 1994, Hopper and Traugott 2003, Lee 2011, De Smet and Van de Velde 2013). Less well understood is under which conditions these changes occur. According to De Smet (2016), specific expressions increase in frequency in one grammatical context, adopting a more conventionalized use, which in turn makes them available in closely related grammatical contexts.

@inproceedings{Degaetano-Ortlieb2017b,
title = {The course of grammatical change in scientific writing: Interdependency between convention and productivity},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Katrin Menzel and Elke Teich},
url = {https://stefaniadegaetano.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/clavier2017-degaetano-etal_accepted_final.pdf},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Conference (CLAVIER)},
address = {Bari, Italy},
abstract = {We present an empirical approach to analyze the course of usage change in scientific writing. A great amount of linguistic research has dealt with grammatical changes, showing their gradual course of change, which nearly always progresses stepwise (see e.g. Bybee et al. 1994, Hopper and Traugott 2003, Lee 2011, De Smet and Van de Velde 2013). Less well understood is under which conditions these changes occur. According to De Smet (2016), specific expressions increase in frequency in one grammatical context, adopting a more conventionalized use, which in turn makes them available in closely related grammatical contexts.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Menzel, Katrin; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania

The diachronic development of combining forms in scientific writing Journal Article

Lege Artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow. The Journal of University of SS Cyril and Methodius in Trnava. Warsaw: De Gruyter Open, 2, pp. 185-249, 2017.
This paper addresses the diachronic development of combining forms in English scientific texts over approximately 350 years, from the early stages of the first scholarly journals that were published in English to contemporary English scientific publications. In this paper a critical discussion of the category of combining forms is presented and a case study is produced to examine the role of selected combining forms in two diachronic English corpora.

@article{Menzel2017,
title = {The diachronic development of combining forms in scientific writing},
author = {Katrin Menzel and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321776056_The_diachronic_development_of_combining_forms_in_scientific_writing},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
journal = {Lege Artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow. The Journal of University of SS Cyril and Methodius in Trnava. Warsaw: De Gruyter Open},
pages = {185-249},
volume = {2},
number = {2},
abstract = {

This paper addresses the diachronic development of combining forms in English scientific texts over approximately 350 years, from the early stages of the first scholarly journals that were published in English to contemporary English scientific publications. In this paper a critical discussion of the category of combining forms is presented and a case study is produced to examine the role of selected combining forms in two diachronic English corpora.
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   B1

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Fischer, Stefan; Demberg, Vera; Teich, Elke

An information-theoretic account on the diachronic development of discourse connectors in scientific writing Inproceedings

39th DGfS AG1, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2017.

@inproceedings{Degaetano-Ortlieb2017b,
title = {An information-theoretic account on the diachronic development of discourse connectors in scientific writing},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Stefan Fischer and Vera Demberg and Elke Teich},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
publisher = {39th DGfS AG1},
address = {Saarbr{\"u}cken, Germany},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Knappen, Jörg; Fischer, Stefan; Kermes, Hannah; Teich, Elke; Fankhauser, Peter

The making of the Royal Society Corpus Inproceedings

21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa) Workshop on Processing Historical language, Workshop on Processing Historical language, pp. 7-11, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2017.
The Royal Society Corpus is a corpus of Early and Late modern English built in an agile process covering publications of the Royal Society of London from 1665 to 1869 (Kermes et al., 2016) with a size of approximately 30 million words. In this paper we will provide details on two aspects of the building process namely the mining of patterns for OCR correction and the improvement and evaluation of part-of-speech tagging.

@inproceedings{Knappen2017,
title = {The making of the Royal Society Corpus},
author = {J{\"o}rg Knappen and Stefan Fischer and Hannah Kermes and Elke Teich and Peter Fankhauser},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331648134_The_Making_of_the_Royal_Society_Corpus},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa) Workshop on Processing Historical language},
pages = {7-11},
publisher = {Workshop on Processing Historical language},
address = {Gothenburg, Sweden},
abstract = {

The Royal Society Corpus is a corpus of Early and Late modern English built in an agile process covering publications of the Royal Society of London from 1665 to 1869 (Kermes et al., 2016) with a size of approximately 30 million words. In this paper we will provide details on two aspects of the building process namely the mining of patterns for OCR correction and the improvement and evaluation of part-of-speech tagging.
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Kermes, Hannah; Teich, Elke

Average surprisal of parts-of-speech Inproceedings

Corpus Linguistics 2017, Birmingham, UK, 2017.

We present an approach to investigate the differences between lexical words and function words and the respective parts-of-speech from an information-theoretical point of view (cf. Shannon, 1949). We use average surprisal (AvS) to measure the amount of information transmitted by a linguistic unit. We expect to find function words to be more predictable (having a lower AvS) and lexical words to be less predictable (having a higher AvS). We also assume that function words‘ AvS is fairly constant over time and registers, while AvS of lexical words is more variable depending on time and register.

@inproceedings{Kermes2017,
title = {Average surprisal of parts-of-speech},
author = {Hannah Kermes and Elke Teich},
url = {https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/corpus/conference-archives/2017/general/paper207.pdf},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
publisher = {Corpus Linguistics 2017},
address = {Birmingham, UK},
abstract = {We present an approach to investigate the differences between lexical words and function words and the respective parts-of-speech from an information-theoretical point of view (cf. Shannon, 1949). We use average surprisal (AvS) to measure the amount of information transmitted by a linguistic unit. We expect to find function words to be more predictable (having a lower AvS) and lexical words to be less predictable (having a higher AvS). We also assume that function words' AvS is fairly constant over time and registers, while AvS of lexical words is more variable depending on time and register.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Teich, Elke

Modeling intra-textual variation with entropy and surprisal: Topical vs. stylistic patterns Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 68-77, Vancouver, Canada, 2017.

We present a data-driven approach to investigate intra-textual variation by combining entropy and surprisal. With this approach we detect linguistic variation based on phrasal lexico-grammatical patterns across sections of research articles. Entropy is used to detect patterns typical of specific sections. Surprisal is used to differentiate between more and less informationally-loaded patterns as well as type of information (topical vs. stylistic). While we here focus on research articles in biology/genetics, the methodology is especially interesting for digital humanities scholars, as it can be applied to any text type or domain and combined with additional variables (e.g. time, author or social group).

@inproceedings{Degaetano-Ortlieb2017,
title = {Modeling intra-textual variation with entropy and surprisal: Topical vs. stylistic patterns},
author = {Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Elke Teich},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W17-2209},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-2209},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature},
pages = {68-77},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
address = {Vancouver, Canada},
abstract = {We present a data-driven approach to investigate intra-textual variation by combining entropy and surprisal. With this approach we detect linguistic variation based on phrasal lexico-grammatical patterns across sections of research articles. Entropy is used to detect patterns typical of specific sections. Surprisal is used to differentiate between more and less informationally-loaded patterns as well as type of information (topical vs. stylistic). While we here focus on research articles in biology/genetics, the methodology is especially interesting for digital humanities scholars, as it can be applied to any text type or domain and combined with additional variables (e.g. time, author or social group).},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   B1

Sekicki, Mirjana; Staudte, Maria

Cognitive load in the visual world: The facilitatory effect of gaze Miscellaneous

39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, London, UK, 2017.
  1. Does following a gaze cue influence the cognitive load required for processing the corresponding linguistic referent?
  2. Is considering the gaze cue costly? Is there a distribution of cognitive load between the cue and the referent?
  3. Can a gaze cue have a disruptive effect on processing the linguistic referent?

@miscellaneous{Sekicki2017,
title = {Cognitive load in the visual world: The facilitatory effect of gaze},
author = {Mirjana Sekicki and Maria Staudte},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
publisher = {39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
address = {London, UK},
abstract = {

  1. Does following a gaze cue influence the cognitive load required for processing the corresponding linguistic referent?
  2. Is considering the gaze cue costly? Is there a distribution of cognitive load between the cue and the referent?
  3. Can a gaze cue have a disruptive effect on processing the linguistic referent?
},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Project:   A5

Vogels, Jorrig; Howcroft, David M.; Demberg, Vera

Referential overspecification in response to the listener's cognitive load Inproceedings

International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Tarttu, Estonia, 2017.

According to the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (UID; Jaeger 2010, inter alia), speakers strive to distribute information equally over their utterances. They do this to avoid both peaks and troughs in information density, which may lead to processing difficulty for the listener. Several studies have shown how speakers consistently make linguistic choices that result in a more equal distribution of information (e.g., Jaeger 2010, Mahowald, Fedorenko, Piantadosi, & Gibson 2013, Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson 2011). However, it is not clear whether speakers also adapt the information density of their utterances to the processing capacity of a specific addressee. For example, when the addressee is involved in a difficult task that is clearly reducing his cognitive capacity for processing linguistic information, will the speaker lower the overall information density of her utterances to accommodate the reduced processing capacity?

@inproceedings{Vogels2017,
title = {Referential overspecification in response to the listener's cognitive load},
author = {Jorrig Vogels and David M. Howcroft and Vera Demberg},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
publisher = {International Cognitive Linguistics Conference},
address = {Tarttu, Estonia},
abstract = {According to the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (UID; Jaeger 2010, inter alia), speakers strive to distribute information equally over their utterances. They do this to avoid both peaks and troughs in information density, which may lead to processing difficulty for the listener. Several studies have shown how speakers consistently make linguistic choices that result in a more equal distribution of information (e.g., Jaeger 2010, Mahowald, Fedorenko, Piantadosi, & Gibson 2013, Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson 2011). However, it is not clear whether speakers also adapt the information density of their utterances to the processing capacity of a specific addressee. For example, when the addressee is involved in a difficult task that is clearly reducing his cognitive capacity for processing linguistic information, will the speaker lower the overall information density of her utterances to accommodate the reduced processing capacity?},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   A4

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