SFB 732:  Incremental Specification in Context

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2006 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 22956010

• Final Report Year: 2018

Final Report Abstract

In collaborations between the various subfields of Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 732 has over a total of 12 years studied a property of linguistic expressions – and the elements that they are composed of – which is observable across all levels of linguistic description: most elements are ambiguous or underspecified when viewed in isolation, but when elements are combined to form larger complexes, most of the ambiguities get resolved. Speech sounds that are compatible with a) various phonemes (e.g. unstressed vowel sounds in fast speech) and/or b) different prosodic categories receive a specific interpretation in a given utterance; syncretic morphological forms (like German sie =she/her/they/them) are disambiguated given the syntax of the sentence; the reading of deverbal nouns like construction, which can refer to an event or its result, is narrowed down through modifiers such as ongoing; etc. At each of the relevant levels of description, it is the elements’ context that drives the disambiguation decision, and the more information becomes available, the narrower is the choice of targets. So what we observe is incremental specification in context. Any account of an aspect of language(s) and language processing must include mechanisms for describing this key ingredient to efficient communicative exchanges, but fully understanding how all relevant levels interact has remained a major challenge in the study of language: Is it specification/disambiguation at one level that triggers further specification decisions at another or vice versa? Or should one assume simultaneous specification decisions? By pursuing these questions in depth for a broad range of linguistic elements, the CRC 732 has significantly enhanced our systematic understanding of language and of speech and language processing. Research contributions range from theoretical advances in various different frameworks over improvements of language-technological models and methodologies to data resources such as speech and text corpora and computational analysis tools.

Publications

• 2010. Discourse prominence and pe-marking in Romanian, International Review of Pragmatics 2(2), pp. 298-332
  Chiriacescu, Sofiana & Klaus von Heusinger
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/187731010X528377)
• 2010. Multilevel Exemplar Theory. Cognitive Science 34, pp. 537-582
  Walsh, Michael, Bernd Möbius, Travis Wade & Hinrich Schütze
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01099.x)
• 2010. Number/Aspect Interactions in the Syntax of Nominalizations: A Distributed Morphology Approach. Journal of Linguistics 46.3, pp. 537-574
  Alexiadou, Artemis, Gianina Iordachioaia & Elena Soare
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226710000058)
• 2010. Syntactic and Semantic Constraints in the Formation and Interpretation of -ung-Nouns. In: Alexiadou, Artemis & Monika Rathert (eds). The Semantics of Nominalisations across Languages and Frameworks. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp 169-214
  Roßdeutscher, Antje & Hans Kamp
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110226546.169)
• 2011. The case of accusative embedded subjects in Mongolian. Lingua, 121(1), pp. 48–59
  von Heusinger, Klaus, Udo Klein & Dolgor Guntsetseg
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.07.006)
• 2011. Underspecifying and Predicting Voice for Surface Realisation Ranking. In: The Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1007–1017
  Zarrieß Sina, Aoife Cahill & Jonas Kuhn
  
• 2012. A Discourse Information Radio News Database for Linguistic Analysis. In: Christian Chiarcos, Sebastian Nordhoff & Sebastian Hellmann, (eds) Linked Data in Linguistics. Representing and Connecting Language Data and Language Metadata, Heidelberg, Springer, pp. 65-75
  Eckart, Kerstin, Arndt Riester & Katrin Schweitzer
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28249-2_7)
• 2012. German specificity markers: ‘bestimmt’ vs. ‘gewiss’. In: Cornelia Ebert & Stefan Hinterwimmer (eds), Different kinds of specificity across languages, Studies in Linguistics & Philosophy. Berlin, Springer, pp. 31-74
  Ebert, Christian, Cornelia Ebert & Stefan Hinterwimmer
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5310-5_3)
• 2012. The passive of reflexive verbs and its implications for theories of binding and case. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 15, pp. 213-268
  Schäfer, Florian
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-013-9052-4)
• 2013. Coreference, lexical givenness and prosody in German. Lingua 136, pp. 16-37
  Baumann, Stefan & Arndt Riester
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.012)
• 2013. Morphological and syntactic case in statistical dependency parsing. Computational Linguistics, pp. 23-55
  Seeker, Wolfgang & Jonas Kuhn
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00134)
• 2013. Sentiment Relevance. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 954–963
  Scheible, Christian & Hinrich Schütze
  
• 2014. Crosslingual and Multilingual Construction of Syntax-Based Vector Space Models. Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 2, pp. 245-258
  Utt, Jason & Sebastian Padó
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00180)
• 2014. Logical metonymy resolution in a words-as-cues framework: evidence from self-paced reading and probe recognition. Cognitive Science 38(5), pp. 973-996
  Zarcone, Alessandra, Sebastian Padó & Alessandro Lenci
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12108)
• 2014. Multiple determiners and the structure of DPs. John Benjamins
  Alexiadou, Artemis
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/la.211)
• 2015. A graph-based lattice dependency parser for joint morphological segmentation and syntactic analysis. Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics 3.1, pp. 359-373
  Seeker, Wolfgang & Özlem Çetinoğlu
  (See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00144)
• 2015. Anarchy in the NP. When new nouns get deaccented and given nouns don't. Lingua 165(B), pp. 230-253
  Riester, Arndt & Jörn Piontek
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.03.006)
• 2015. Attention, please! - Expanding the GECO database. In: Proceedings of the International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Glasgow
  Schweitzer, Antje, Natalie Lewandowski, Daniel Duran & Grzegorz Dogil
  
• 2015. Distributional vectors encode referential attributes. In: Proceedings of EMNLP, Lisbon, pp. 12-21
  Gupta, Abhijeet, Gemma Boleda, Marco Baroni & Sebastian Padó
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D15-1002)
• 2015. Explaining the link between agentivity and non-culminating causation. In: Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 25, pp. 246-266
  Martin, Fabienne
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v25i0.3060)
• 2015. Exploring the relationship between intonation and the lexicon: Evidence for lexicalised storage of intonation. Speech Communication (66), pp. 65-81
  Schweitzer, Katrin, Michael Walsh, Sasha Calhoun, Hinrich Schütze, Bernd Möbius, Antje Schweitzer & Grzegorz Dogil
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2014.09.006)
• 2015. External arguments in transitivity alternations: a layering approach. Oxford, Oxford University Press
  Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Florian Schäfer
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571949.001.0001)
• 2015. Pluractionality with Lexically Cumulative Verbs: The Supine Nominalization in Romanian. Natural Language Semantics 23.4, pp. 307-352
  Iordachioaia, Gianina & Elena Soare
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-015-9117-9)
• 2015. Using prosodic annotations to improve coreference resolution of spoken text. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP), Beijing, pp. 83-88
  Rösiger, Ina & Arndt Riester
  (See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.3115/v1/P15-2014)
• 2016. Contrastive topic constituents in German. Proceedings of Speech Prosody, Boston, pp. 345-349
  Zerbian, Sabine, Giuseppina Turco, Nadja Schauffler, Margaret Zellers & Arndt Riester
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-71)
• 2016. Distinguishing Literal and Non-Literal Usage of German Particle Verbs. In: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL- HLT), San Diego, pp. 353–362
  Köper, Maximilian & Sabine Schulte im Walde
  (See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/N16-1039)
• 2016. How to train dependency parsers with inexact search for joint sentence boundary detection and parsing of entire documents. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1924-1934
  Björkelund, Anders, Agnieszka Faleńska, Wolfgang Seeker & Jonas Kuhn
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P16-1181)
• 2016. Joint information structure and discourse structure analysis in an Underspecified DRT framework. In: Julie Hunter, Mandy Simons & Matthew Stone (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (JerSem), New Brunswick, pp. 15-24
  Reyle, Uwe & Arndt Riester
  
• 2016. Learning to Make Inferences in a Semantic Parsing Task. In Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol 4, pp. 155-168
  Richardson, Kyle & Jonas Kuhn
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00090)
• 2016. Theta-head binding in the German locative alternation. In: Bade, Nadine, Polina Berezovskaya & Anthea Schöller (eds). Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20, University of Tübingen, September 2015, pp. 270-287
  Geist, Ljudmila & Daniel Hole
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2016.v20i0.263)
• 2017. Complement Coercion: The Joint Effects of Type and Typicality. Frontiers in Psychology, 8
  Zarcone, Alessandra, Ken McRae, Alessandro Lenci & Sebastian Padó
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01987)
• 2017. Differential Object Marking of human definite direct objects in Romanian. Revue roumaine de linguistique 62(4), pp. 359-376
  Onea, Edgar & Daniel Hole
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.34224.25608)
• 2017. Evaluating Compound Splitters Extrinsically with Textual Entailment. Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Vancouver, pp. 58–63
  Jagfeld, Glorianna, Patrick Ziering & Lonneke van der Plas
  (See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-2010)
• 2017. Integrating lexical-conceptual and distributional semantics: a case report. In: Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam, pp. 75-84
  Pross, Tillmann, Antje Roßdeutscher, Gabriella Lapesa, Max Kisselew & Sebastian Padó
  
• 2018. Diachronic Usage Relatedness (DURel): A Framework for the Annotation of Lexical Semantic Change. In: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), New Orleans, pp. 169–174
  Schlechtweg, Dominik, Sabine Schulte im Walde & Stefanie Eckmann
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N18-2027)
• 2018. Disambiguation of newly derived nominalizations in context: A Distributional Semantics approach. Word Structure, 11(3), 315-350
  Lapesa, Gabriella, Lea Kawaletz, Ingo Plag, Marios Andreou, Max Kisselew & Sebastian Padó
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2018.0131)
• 2018. Effects of Word Embeddings on Neural Network-based Pitch Accent Detection. In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody Conference, pp. 719-723
  Stehwien, Sabrina, Ngoc Thang Vu & Antje Schweitzer
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-146)
• 2018. German Radio Interviews: The GRAIN Release of the SFB732 Silver Standard Collection. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), pp. 2887-2895
  Schweitzer, Katrin, Kerstin Eckart, Markus Gärtner, Agnieszka Falenska, Arndt Riester, Ina Rösiger, Antje Schweitzer, Sabrina Stehwien & Jonas Kuhn
  
• 2018. Lexico-acoustic Neural-based Models for Dialog Act Classification. In: Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 6194-6198
  Ortega, Daniel & Ngoc Thang Vu
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2018.8461371)
• 2018. What about lexical semantics if syntax is the only generative component of the grammar? A case study on word meaning in German. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 36
  Pross, Tillmann
  (See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9410-7)