All systems for automatic sign language translation and recognition, in particular statistical systems, rely on adequately sized corpora. For this purpose, we created the Phoenix corpus that is based on German television weather reports translated into German Sign Language. It comes with a rich annotation of the video data, a bilingual text-based sentence corpus and a monolingual German corpus.

We propose a generic, memory-based approach for the detection of implicit semantic roles. While state-of-the-art methods for this task combine hand-crafted rules with specialized and costly lexical resources, our models use large corpora with automated annotations for explicit semantic roles only to capture the distribution of predicates and their associated roles. We show that memory-based lea...

In this paper we present SB10k, a new corpus for sentiment analysis with approx. 10,000 German tweets. We use this new corpus and two existing corpora to provide state-of-the-art benchmarks for sentiment analysis in German: we implemented a CNN (based on the winning system of SemEval-2016) and a feature-based SVM and compare their performance on all three corpora. For the CNN, we also created G...

Academic essays entail taking a stance on the truth value of propositions. Epistemic adverbs deal with the speaker's assessment of the truth value of propositions. Employing a corpus-based approach with descriptive statistics and qualitative description, this study explored the use of epistemic stance adverbs in academic essays written by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners. Follow...

This paper describes the design and implementation of an XML-based corpus environment for multi-tier annotated speech data. The TASX-environment (TASX: Time Aligned Signal data eXchange format) constitutes the technical basis for a corpus designed to explore the acquisition of prosody by second language learners. It supports all aspects of the corpus setup procedure: XML-based annotation of the...

This study examines how different dimensions of corpus frequency data may affect the outcome of statistical modeling of lexical items. The corpus used in our analysis is an elderly speaker corpus in its early development, and the target words are temporal expressions, which might reveal how the speech produced by the elderly is organized. We conduct divisive hierarchical clustering based on two...

Thematic analysis is best manifested by contrasting collocations1 such as “shipping pacemakers” vs. “shipping departments”. While in the first pair, the pacemakers are being shipped, in the second one, the departments are probably engaged in some shipping activity, but are not being shipped. Text pre-processors, intended to inject corpus-based intuition into the parsing process, must adequately...

Experimental evaluation of clustering techniques for component recovery is necessary in order to analyze their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other techniques. For comparable evaluations of automatic clustering techniques, a common reference corpus of freely available systems is needed for which the actual components are known. The reference corpus is used to measure recall and preci...

The Knowledge Based Population (KBP) evaluation track of the Text Analysis Conferences (TAC) has been held for the past 3 years. One of the two tasks of KBP is slot filling: finding within a large corpus the values of a set of attributes of given people and organizations. This task has proven very challenging, with top systems rarely exceeding 30% F-measure. In this paper, we present an error a...