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TIGER: Linguistic Interpretation of a German Corpus

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Research on Language and Computation

Abstract

This paper reports on the TIGER Treebank, a corpus of currently 40,000 syntactically annotated German newspaper sentences. We describe what kind of information is encoded in the treebank and introduce the different representation formats that are used for the annotation and exploitation of the treebank. We explain the different methods used for the annotation: interactive annotation, using the tool ANNOTATE, and LFG parsing. Furthermore, we give an account of the annotation scheme used for the TIGER treebank. This scheme is an extended and improved version of the NEGRA annotation scheme and we illustrate in detail the linguistic extensions that were made concerning the annotation in the TIGER project. The main differences are concerned with coordination, verb-subcategorization, expletives as well as proper nouns. In addition, the paper also presents the query tool TIGERSearch that was developed in the project to exploit the treebank in an adequate way. We describe the query language which was designed to facilitate a simple formulation of complex queries; furthermore, we shortly introduce TIGER in, a graphical user interface for query input. The paper concludes with a summary and some directions for future work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany

    Sabine Brants, Silvia Hansen-Schirra & Hans Uszkoreit

  2. Institute of Natural Language Processing (IMS), Stuttgart University, Germany

    Stefanie Dipper, Esther König, Wolfgang Lezius & Christian Rohrer

  3. Institut für Germanistik, Potsdam University, Germany

    Peter Eisenberg & George Smith

Authors
  1. Sabine Brants
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  2. Stefanie Dipper
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  3. Peter Eisenberg
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  4. Silvia Hansen-Schirra
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  5. Esther König
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  6. Wolfgang Lezius
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  7. Christian Rohrer
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  8. George Smith
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  9. Hans Uszkoreit
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Correspondence to Sabine Brants.

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Brants, S., Dipper, S., Eisenberg, P. et al. TIGER: Linguistic Interpretation of a German Corpus. Res Lang Comput 2, 597–620 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11168-004-7431-3

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