Off-line (and on-line) text analysis for computational lexicography

Acknowledgements The research reported on in this thesis was based on work in two projects: the DFG-project Deutsches Referenzkorpus, a joint project of the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS) in Stuttgart, the Seminar für Sprach-wissenschaft (SfS) in Tübingen, and the Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, and the DFG-Transferbereich project Automatische Exzerption which is intended to support the transfer of know-how from universities to companies (project partners are the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS) in Stuttgart, the Dudenredaktion in Mannheim and the Langenscheidt KG in München). I would like to thank all the members of the IMS for providing an excellent and friendly working environment. In particular I wish to thank my supervisors Christian Rohrer and Ulrich Heid for fruitful discussions, for their feedback and motivation, and for the fact that they were always willing to lend me an ear. I am grateful to Esther König, who was responsible for the DEREKO-project, for her permanent unofficial supervision. She encouraged me to go my own way without losing sight of the main issues. She was of great help discussing conceptual as well as technical issues, thus putting my research on a solid foundation. Special thanks go to Stefan Evert, my office-mate, who not only discussed work matters with me, but is also responsible for implementing, and modifying tools I used for my research. I could not have realized many of the ideas I had, had he not implemented new features, and thus opened up new possibilities. In addition, I want to thank Wolfgang Lezius for providing an import filter for TIGERSearch for my chunker. I also want to thank Stefanie Dipper, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Heike Zinsmeister, and Arne Fitschen for giving me insights into their work, Kristina Spranger for writing a Dutch version of the chunker and for giving remarks on the grammar, and Piklu Gupta for revising my English. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends for the support, encouragement and distraction they provided me. And, last but not least, I want to thank Thomas for his support and for letting me forget about work.