Please cite:
Kümmel, Miriam. 2019. Automatic Ellipsis Detection - Machine Learning vs. Rule-Based Document Classification. Master Thesis. University of Konstanz - Germany
"Ich habe sie genehmigt, aber ich kann nicht mehr genau sagen, wann."
36 search queries containing 36 german wh-phrases were run on the two source corpora (https://www.dwds.de/r)
Result: 479 german sentences with a final wh-word and period.
The corpus is in csv-format and can easily be browsed and manipulated (e.g. only show sluices) in Excel.
DATA:
- Genre (column A): contains the Genre of the document the hit is taken from
- Bibl (column B): bibliographic details about the document
- ContextBefore, Hit, and ContextAfter (columns C-E): one sentence before the hit, the actual wh-final sentence, and one sentence after the hit
MANUAL DATA ANNOTATION:
- Sluice or Non-Sluice (column G): The sentences in the corpus were annotated as sluice (‘y’) or non-sluice (‘n’)
- What Non-Sluice (column H): Non-Sluices were divided in four groups. Indefinite pronouns, elisions, interjections, and frozen expressions.
- Embedding Verb and its Position (columns I and J): If a sentence turned out to be a sluice, the embedding verb was annotated into column I. In the same step, the position of the embedding verb was annotated in column J: if the embed-ding verb was the last verbal element before the final wh-phrase, column J contains ‘-1’, if it was the penultimate verb, it contains ‘-2’ etc.
- Merger or Sprouting (column K): the sluices in the corpus were annotated with an ‘s’ in column K if they were sprouting sluices and an ‘m’ for ‘merger’ if they had an overt antecedent. ‘bef’ was added if the antecedent was found in the context before the hit.
- Negation (column L): Both, sluices and non-sluices were annotated with the information if the clause the wh-word is related to, is negated (‘y’) or not (‘n’). If it is negated, the negating phrase was annotated in the same column (e.g. ‘y, indefpron’ or ‘y, ohne’ (Engl.: without)).
COMPUTATIONAL DATA ANNOTATION:
- POS-tagged Hit and Context_before (columns N and O): Every Hit and the sentence before in the corpus were tagged by the TreeTagger.
- wh-Phrase and POS of wh-Phrase (columns F and P): The tagged material was subsequently used to fill column F with the wh-phrase used in the sentence. The POS of the wh-phrase was put into column P.
- Sentence Length (column M)
- Last Verbal Element and Comparison to Embedding Verb (column Q and R): the last verbal element before the wh-remnant was extracted and assigned to column P. If no verb could be found in the hit itself, the loop went through the tagged sentence before the hit (‘ContextBefore’, column C). If it still could not find a verb, one exception was hard coded: if the sequence ‘keine Ahnung’ (Engl.: no idea) was in the hit, the program ascribed ‘keine Ahnung haben’ to the last verbal element. If that was not the case either, ‘<none>’ was put into the column. Subsequently, the last verbal element was compared to the manually annotated embedding verb (column I) to see if they are the same (‘y’/’n’).
- Prediction (column S): A specifically built Sluice-detector can make predictions about a sentence being a sluice or not. (see https://github.com/mkkuemmel/EllipsisDetection)