Andreas Witt


2024

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Ethical Issues in Language Resources and Language Technology – New Challenges, New Perspectives
Pawel Kamocki | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies @ LREC-COLING 2024

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Detecting Impact Relevant Sections in Scientific Research
Maria Becker | Kanyao Han | Haejin Lee | Antonina Werthmann | Rezvaneh Rezapour | Jana Diesner | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Impact assessment is an evolving area of research that aims at measuring and predicting the potential effects of projects or programs. Measuring the impact of scientific research is a vibrant subdomain, closely intertwined with impact assessment. A recurring obstacle pertains to the absence of an efficient framework which can facilitate the analysis of lengthy reports and text labeling. To address this issue, we propose a framework for automatically assessing the impact of scientific research projects by identifying pertinent sections in project reports that indicate the potential impacts. We leverage a mixed-method approach, combining manual annotations with supervised machine learning, to extract these passages from project reports. We experiment with different machine learning algorithms, including traditional statistical models as well as pre-trained transformer language models. Our experiments show that our proposed method achieves accuracy scores up to 0.81, and that our method is generalizable to scientific research from different domains and different languages.

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EuReCo: Not Building and Yet Using Federated Comparable Corpora for Cross-Linguistic Research
Marc Kupietz | Piotr Banski | Nils Diewald | Beata Trawinski | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC) @ LREC-COLING 2024

2022

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Ethical Issues in Language Resources and Language Technology – Tentative Categorisation
Pawel Kamocki | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Ethical issues in Language Resources and Language Technology are often invoked, but rarely discussed. This is at least partly because little work has been done to systematize ethical issues and principles applicable in the fields of Language Resources and Language Technology. This paper provides an overview of ethical issues that arise at different stages of Language Resources and Language Technology development, from the conception phase through the construction phase to the use phase. Based on this overview, the authors propose a tentative taxonomy of ethical issues in Language Resources and Language Technology, built around five principles: Privacy, Property, Equality, Transparency and Freedom. The authors hope that this tentative taxonomy will facilitate ethical assessment of projects in the field of Language Resources and Language Technology, and structure the discussion on ethical issues in this domain, which may eventually lead to the adoption of a universally accepted Code of Ethics of the Language Resources and Language Technology community.

2020

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Twenty-two Historical Encyclopedias Encoded in TEI: a New Resource for the Digital Humanities
Thora Hagen | Erik Ketzan | Fotis Jannidis | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the 4th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

This paper accompanies the corpus publication of EncycNet, a novel XML/TEI annotated corpus of 22 historical German encyclopedias from the early 18th to early 20th century. We describe the creation and annotation of the corpus, including the rationale for its development, suggested methodology for TEI annotation, possible use cases and future work. While many well-developed annotation standards for lexical resources exist, none can adequately model the encyclopedias at hand, and we therefore suggest how the TEI Lex-0 standard may be modified with additional guidelines for the annotation of historical encyclopedias. As the digitization and annotation of historical encyclopedias are settling on TEI as the de facto standard, our methodology may inform similar projects.

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Interoperability in an Infrastructure Enabling Multidisciplinary Research: The case of CLARIN
Franciska de Jong | Bente Maegaard | Darja Fišer | Dieter van Uytvanck | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It supports the use and study of language data in general and aims to increase the potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and disciplines, all in line with the European agenda for Open Science. Data infrastructures such as CLARIN have recently embarked on the emerging frameworks for the federation of infrastructural services, such as the European Open Science Cloud and the integration of services resulting from multidisciplinary collaboration in federated services for the wider SSH domain. In this paper we describe the interoperability requirements that arise through the existing ambitions and the emerging frameworks. The interoperability theme will be addressed at several levels, including organisation and ecosystem, design of workflow services, data curation, performance measurement and collaboration.

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Privacy by Design and Language Resources
Pawel Kamocki | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Privacy by Design (also referred to as Data Protection by Design) is an approach in which solutions and mechanisms addressing privacy and data protection are embedded through the entire project lifecycle, from the early design stage, rather than just added as an additional lawyer to the final product. Formulated in the 1990 by the Privacy Commissionner of Ontario, the principle of Privacy by Design has been discussed by institutions and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, and mentioned already in the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC). More recently, Privacy by Design was introduced as one of the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), obliging data controllers to define and adopt, already at the conception phase, appropriate measures and safeguards to implement data protection principles and protect the rights of the data subject. Failing to meet this obligation may result in a hefty fine, as it was the case in the Uniontrad decision by the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL). The ambition of the proposed paper is to analyse the practical meaning of Privacy by Design in the context of Language Resources, and propose measures and safeguards that can be implemented by the community to ensure respect of this principle.

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Beyond Citations: Corpus-based Methods for Detecting the Impact of Research Outcomes on Society
Rezvaneh Rezapour | Jutta Bopp | Norman Fiedler | Diana Steffen | Andreas Witt | Jana Diesner
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper proposes, implements and evaluates a novel, corpus-based approach for identifying categories indicative of the impact of research via a deductive (top-down, from theory to data) and an inductive (bottom-up, from data to theory) approach. The resulting categorization schemes differ in substance. Research outcomes are typically assessed by using bibliometric methods, such as citation counts and patterns, or alternative metrics, such as references to research in the media. Shortcomings with these methods are their inability to identify impact of research beyond academia (bibliometrics) and considering text-based impact indicators beyond those that capture attention (altmetrics). We address these limitations by leveraging a mixed-methods approach for eliciting impact categories from experts, project personnel (deductive) and texts (inductive). Using these categories, we label a corpus of project reports per category schema, and apply supervised machine learning to infer these categories from project reports. The classification results show that we can predict deductively and inductively derived impact categories with 76.39% and 78.81% accuracy (F1-score), respectively. Our approach can complement solutions from bibliometrics and scientometrics for assessing the impact of research and studying the scope and types of advancements transferred from academia to society.

2018

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Introducing the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Linguistic Diversity and Language Documentation
Hanna Hedeland | Timm Lehmberg | Felix Rau | Sophie Salffner | Mandana Seyfeddinipur | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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The German Reference Corpus DeReKo: New Developments – New Opportunities
Marc Kupietz | Harald Lüngen | Paweł Kamocki | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2016

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Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF)
Piotr Bański | Elena Frick | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

The present paper describes Corpus Query Lingua Franca (ISO CQLF), a specification designed at ISO Technical Committee 37 Subcommittee 4 “Language resource management” for the purpose of facilitating the comparison of properties of corpus query languages. We overview the motivation for this endeavour and present its aims and its general architecture. CQLF is intended as a multi-part specification; here, we concentrate on the basic metamodel that provides a frame that the other parts fit in.

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KorAP Architecture ― Diving in the Deep Sea of Corpus Data
Nils Diewald | Michael Hanl | Eliza Margaretha | Joachim Bingel | Marc Kupietz | Piotr Bański | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

KorAP is a corpus search and analysis platform, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). It supports very large corpora with multiple annotation layers, multiple query languages, and complex licensing scenarios. KorAP’s design aims to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable to serve the German Reference Corpus DeReKo for at least the next decade. To meet these requirements, we have adopted a highly modular microservice-based architecture. This paper outlines our approach: An architecture consisting of small components that are easy to extend, replace, and maintain. The components include a search backend, a user and corpus license management system, and a web-based user frontend. We also describe a general corpus query protocol used by all microservices for internal communications. KorAP is open source, licensed under BSD-2, and available on GitHub.

2014

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Access control by query rewriting: the case of KorAP
Piotr Bański | Nils Diewald | Michael Hanl | Marc Kupietz | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

We present an approach to an aspect of managing complex access scenarios to large and heterogeneous corpora that involves handling user queries that, intentionally or due to the complexity of the queried resource, target texts or annotations outside of the given user’s permissions. We first outline the overall architecture of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, devoting some attention to the way in which it handles multiple query languages, by implementing ISO CQLF (Corpus Query Lingua Franca), which in turn constitutes a component crucial for the functionality discussed here. Next, we look at query rewriting as it is used by KorAP and zoom in on one kind of this procedure, namely the rewriting of queries that is forced by data access restrictions.

2012

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The New IDS Corpus Analysis Platform: Challenges and Prospects
Piotr Bański | Peter M. Fischer | Elena Frick | Erik Ketzan | Marc Kupietz | Carsten Schnober | Oliver Schonefeld | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

The present article describes the first stage of the KorAP project, launched recently at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The aim of this project is to develop an innovative corpus analysis platform to tackle the increasing demands of modern linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse primary data and annotations in the petabyte range, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary linguistic data, and thus fully satisfying the demands of a scientific tool. An additional important aim of the project is to make corpus data as openly accessible as possible in light of unavoidable legal restrictions, for instance through support for distributed virtual corpora, user-defined annotations and adaptable user interfaces, as well as interfaces and sandboxes for user-supplied analysis applications. We discuss our motivation for undertaking this endeavour and the challenges that face it. Next, we outline our software implementation plan and describe development to-date.

2010

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The German Reference Corpus DeReKo: A Primordial Sample for Linguistic Research
Marc Kupietz | Cyril Belica | Holger Keibel | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

This paper describes DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, and the rationale behind its development. We discuss its design, its legal background, how to access it, available metadata, linguistic annotation layers, underlying standards, ongoing developments, and aspects of using the archive for empirical linguistic research. The focus of the paper is on the advantages of DeReKo's design as a primordial sample from which virtual corpora can be drawn for the specific purposes of individual studies. Both concepts, primordial sample and virtual corpus are explained and illustrated in detail. Furthermore, we describe in more detail how DeReKo deals with the fact that all its texts are subject to third parties' intellectual property rights, and how it deals with the issue of replicability, which is particularly challenging given DeReKo's dynamic growth and the possibility to construct from it an open number of virtual corpora.

2008

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Influence of Text Type and Text Length on Anaphoric Annotation
Daniela Goecke | Maik Stührenberg | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

We report the results of a study that investigates the agreement of anaphoric annotations. The study focuses on the influence of the factors text length and text type on a corpus of scientific articles and newspaper texts. In order to measure inter-annotator agreement we compare existing approaches and we propose to measure each step of the annotation process separately instead of measuring the resulting anaphoric relations only. A total amount of 3,642 anaphoric relations has been annotated for a corpus of 53,038 tokens (12,327 markables). The results of the study show that text type has more influence on inter-annotator agreement than text length. Furthermore, the definition of well-defined annotation instructions and coder training is a crucial point in order to receive good annotation results.

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The Metadata-Database of a Next Generation Sustainability Web-Platform for Language Resources
Georg Rehm | Oliver Schonefeld | Andreas Witt | Timm Lehmberg | Christian Chiarcos | Hanan Bechara | Florian Eishold | Kilian Evang | Magdalena Leshtanska | Aleksandar Savkov | Matthias Stark
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

Our goal is to provide a web-based platform for the long-term preservation and distribution of a heterogeneous collection of linguistic resources. We discuss the corpus preprocessing and normalisation phase that results in sets of multi-rooted trees. At the same time we transform the original metadata records, just like the corpora annotated using different annotation approaches and exhibiting different levels of granularity, into the all-encompassing and highly flexible format eTEI for which we present editing and parsing tools. We also discuss the architecture of the sustainability platform. Its primary components are an XML database that contains corpus and metadata files and an SQL database that contains user accounts and access control lists. A staging area, whose structure, contents, and consistency can be checked using tools, is used to make sure that new resources about to be imported into the platform have the correct structure.

2006

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Language Resources and Interoperability
Andreas Witt | Gilles Sérasset | Susan Armstrong | Jim Breen | Ulrich Heid | Felix Sasaki
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Language Resources and Interoperability

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Multidimensional markup and heterogeneous linguistic resources
Maik Stührenberg | Andreas Witt | Daniela Goecke | Dieter Metzing | Oliver Schonefeld
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on NLP and XML (NLPXML-2006): Multi-Dimensional Markup in Natural Language Processing

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Exploiting logical document structure for anaphora resolution
Daniela Goecke | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, an approach is presented how to select the correct antecedent for an anaphoric element according to the kind of text segments in which both of them occur. Basically, information on logical text structure (e.g. chapters, sections, paragraphs) is used in order to select the antecedent life span of a linguistic expression, i.e. some linguistic expressions are more likely to be chosen as an antecedent throughout the whole text than others. In addition, an appropriate search scope for an anaphora expressed by an expression can be defined according to the document structuring elements that include the linguistic expression. Corpus investigations give rise to the supposition that logical text structure influences the search scope of candidates for antecedents. Second, a solution is presented how to integrate the resources used for anaphora resolution. In this approach, multi-layered XML annotation is used in order to make a set of resources accessible for the anaphora resolution system.

2004

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Concept-based Queries: Combining and Reusing Linguistic Corpus Formats and Query Languages
Felix Sasaki | Andreas Witt | Dafydd Gibbon | Thorsten Trippel
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

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Co-reference in Japanese Task-oriented Dialogues: A Contribution to the Development of Language-specific and Language-general Annotation Schemes and Resources
Felix Sasaki | Andreas Witt
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04)

2002

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Co-reference annotation and resources: A multilingual corpus of typologically diverse languages
Felix Sasaki | Claudia Wegener | Andreas Witt | Dieter Metzing | Jens Pönninghaus
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02)

2000

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Enhancing Speech Corpus Resources with Multiple Lexical Tag Layers
Andreas Witt | Harald Lüngen | Dafydd Gibbon
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’00)