Publications and Talks

2023

1. ACL

   A comparative corpus study of race and Rasse

   Erbach, Kurt, Kenyah-Damptey, Benedict, Berio, Leda, James, Daniel, and Seyffarth, Esther

   Applied Corpus Linguistics 2023

   Abs Bibtex url

   Beyond the context of cross-cultural pragmatics, it has been claimed that race and Rasse are not equivalent terms. The current paper seeks to establish the first known program of study to shed light on the extent to which race and Rasse differ. Corpora of US and German newspapers are used in this paper to sample mainstream race talk in the respective countries, and top collocates are analyzed along with a selection of examples. What is seen is that, while the historical context of slavery and the civil rights movement in the US and Nazism in Germany do seem to be reflected in the respective corpora, it is not so clear that the underlying meaning of race and Rasse are as different as some have claimed.

         @article{ERBACH2023100044,
     title = {A comparative corpus study of race and Rasse},
     journal = {Applied Corpus Linguistics},
     volume = {3},
     number = {1},
     abbr = {ACL},
     pages = {100044},
     year = {2023},
     issn = {2666-7991},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100044},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666799123000047},
     author = {Erbach, Kurt and Kenyah-Damptey, Benedict and Berio, Leda and James, Daniel and Seyffarth, Esther},
     keywords = {Race, Rasse, cross-linguistic, American English, German}
   }
   
         

2022

1. LREC

   The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus (MASC): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus

   Eid, Ghattas, Seyffarth, Esther, and Plag, Ingo

   In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022) 2022

   Abs Bibtex

   This paper presents the first electronic speech corpus of Maaloula Aramaic, an endangered Western Neo-Aramaic variety spoken in Syria. This 64,845-word corpus is available in four formats: (1) transcriptions, (2) lemmatized transcriptions, (3) audio files and time-aligned phonetic transcriptions, and (4) an SQLite database. The transcription files are a digitized and corrected version of authentic transcriptions of tape-recorded narratives coming from a fieldwork trip conducted in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s (Arnold, 1991a, 1991b). They contain no annotation, except for some informative tagging (e.g. to mark loanwords and misspoken words). In the lemmatized version of the files, each word form is followed by its lemma in angled brackets. The time-aligned TextGrid annotations consist of four tiers: the sentence level (Tier 1), the word level (Tiers 2 and 3), and the segment level (Tier 4). These TextGrid files are downloadable together with their audio files (for the original source of the audio data see Arnold, 2003). The SQLite database enables users to access the data on the level of tokens, types, lemmas, sentences, narratives, or speakers. The corpus is now available to the scientific community at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6496714.

         @inproceedings{eid-etal-2022-masc,
     title = {{The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus} ({MASC}): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus},
     author = {Eid, Ghattas and Seyffarth, Esther and Plag, Ingo},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2022)},
     abbr = {{LREC}},
     month = jun,
     year = {2022},
     address = {Marseille, France},
     publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}
   }
   
         

2021

1. IWCS

   Implicit representations of event properties within contextual language models: Searching for "causativity neurons"

   Seyffarth, Esther, Samih, Younes, Kallmeyer, Laura, and Sajjad, Hassan

   In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) 2021

   Abs Bibtex url

   This paper addresses the question to which extent neural contextual language models such as BERT implicitly represent complex semantic properties. More concretely, the paper shows that the neuron activations obtained from processing an English sentence provide discriminative features for predicting the (non-)causativity of the event denoted by the verb in a simple linear classifier. A layer-wise analysis reveals that the relevant properties are mostly learned in the higher layers. Moreover, further experiments show that appr. 10% of the neuron activations are enough to already predict causativity with a relatively high accuracy.

         @inproceedings{seyffarth-EtAl:2021:IWCS,
     author = {Seyffarth, Esther and Samih, Younes and Kallmeyer, Laura and Sajjad, Hassan},
     title = {Implicit representations of event properties within contextual language models: Searching for "causativity neurons"},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS)},
     abbr = {{IWCS}},
     month = jun,
     year = {2021},
     address = {Groningen, The Netherlands (online)},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     pages = {110--120},
     url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.iwcs-1.11}
   }
   
         

2020

1. COLING

   Corpus-based Identification of Verbs Participating in Verb Alternations Using Classification and Manual Annotation

   Seyffarth, Esther, and Kallmeyer, Laura

   In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics 2020

   Abs Bibtex Supp url

   English verb alternations allow participating verbs to appear in a set of syntactically different constructions whose associated semantic frames are systematically related. We use ENCOW and VerbNet data to train classifiers to predict the instrument subject alternation and the causative-inchoative alternation, relying on count-based and vector-based features as well as perplexity-based language model features, which are intended to reflect each alternation’s felicity by simulating it. Beyond the prediction task, we use the classifier results as a source for a manual annotation step in order to identify new, unseen instances of each alternation. This is possible because existing alternation datasets contain positive, but no negative instances and are not comprehensive. Over several sequences of classification-annotation steps, we iteratively extend our sets of alternating verbs. Our hybrid approach to the identification of new alternating verbs reduces the required annotation effort by only presenting annotators with the highest-scoring candidates from the previous classification. Due to the success of semi-supervised and unsupervised features, our approach can easily be transferred to further alternations.

         @inproceedings{seyffarth-kallmeyer-2020-corpus,
     title = {Corpus-based Identification of Verbs Participating in Verb Alternations Using Classification and Manual Annotation},
     author = {Seyffarth, Esther and Kallmeyer, Laura},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
     abbr = {{COLING}},
     month = dec,
     year = {2020},
     address = {Barcelona, Spain (Online)},
     publisher = {International Committee on Computational Linguistics},
     url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.coling-main.357},
     supp = {https://github.com/eseyffarth/alternation-identification-coling2020},
     pages = {4044--4055}
   }
   
         

2019

1. SCiL

   Identifying Participation of Individual Verbs or VerbNet Classes in the Causative Alternation

   Seyffarth, Esther

   In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL) 2019 2019

   Abs Bibtex Poster url

   Verbs that participate in diathesis alternations have different semantics in their different syntactic environments, which need to be distinguished in order to process these verbs and their contexts correctly. We design and implement 8 approaches to the automatic identification of the causative alternation in English (3 based on VerbNet classes, 5 based on individual verbs). For verbs in this alternation, the semantic roles that contribute to the meaning of the verb can be associated with different syntactic slots. Our most successful approaches use distributional vectors and achieve an F1 score of up to 79% on a balanced test set. We also apply our approaches to the distinction between the causative alternation and the unexpressed object alternation. Our best system for this is based on syntactic information, with an F1 score of 75% on a balanced test set.

         @inproceedings{seyffarth-2019-identifying,
     title = {Identifying Participation of Individual Verbs or {V}erb{N}et Classes in the Causative Alternation},
     author = {Seyffarth, Esther},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics ({SC}i{L}) 2019},
     abbr = {{SCiL}},
     year = {2019},
     url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-0115},
     doi = {10.7275/efvz-jy59},
     pages = {146--155},
     poster = {2019_scil_seyffarth_poster.pdf}
   }
   
         

2. IWCS-CSTFRS

   Modeling the Induced Action Alternation and the Caused-Motion Construction with Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) and Semantic Frames

   Seyffarth, Esther

   In Proceedings of the IWCS 2019 Workshop on Computing Semantics with Types, Frames and Related Structures 2019

   Abs Bibtex Slides url

   The induced action alternation and the caused-motion construction are two phenomena that allow English verbs to be interpreted as motion-causing events. This is possible when a verb is used with a direct object and a directional phrase, even when the verb does not lexically signify causativity or motion, as in “Sylvia laughed Mary off the stage”. While participation in the induced action alternation is a lexical property of certain verbs, the caused-motion construction is not anchored in the lexicon. We model both phenomena with XMG-2 and use the TuLiPA parser to create compositional semantic frames for example sentences. We show how such frames represent the key differences between these two phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface, and how TAG can be used to derive distinct analyses for them.

         @inproceedings{seyffarth-2019-modeling,
     title = {Modeling the Induced Action Alternation and the Caused-Motion Construction with {T}ree {A}djoining {G}rammar ({TAG}) and Semantic Frames},
     author = {Seyffarth, Esther},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the {IWCS} 2019 Workshop on Computing Semantics with Types, Frames and Related Structures},
     abbr = {{IWCS-CSTFRS}},
     month = jun,
     year = {2019},
     address = {Gothenburg, Sweden},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-1003},
     doi = {10.18653/v1/W19-1003},
     pages = {19--27},
     slides = {2019_cstfrs_seyffarth_slides.pdf}
   }
   
         

2018

1. LREC

   AET: Web-based Adjective Exploration Tool for German

   Bladier, Tatiana, Seyffarth, Esther, Hellwig, Oliver, and Petersen, Wiebke

   In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) 2018

   Abs Bibtex Supp Poster Website url

   We present a new web-based corpus query tool, the Adjective Exploration Tool (AET), which enables research on the modificational behavior of German adjectives and adverbs. The tool can also be transferred to other languages and modification phenomena. The underlying database is derived from a corpus of German print media texts, which we annnotated with dependency parses and several morphological, lexical, and statistical properties of the tokens. We extracted pairs of adjectives and adverbs (modifiers) as well as the tokens modified by them (modifiees) from the corpus and stored them in a way that makes the modifier-modifiee pairs easily searchable. With AET, linguists from different research areas can access corpus samples using an intuitive query language and user-friendly web interface. AET has been developed as a part of a collaborative research project that focuses on the compositional interaction of attributive adjectives with nouns and the interplay of events and adverbial modifiers. The tool is easy to extend and update and is free to use online without registration: http://aet.phil.hhu.de

         @inproceedings{bladier-etal-2018-aet,
     title = {{AET}: Web-based Adjective Exploration Tool for {G}erman},
     author = {Bladier, Tatiana and Seyffarth, Esther and Hellwig, Oliver and Petersen, Wiebke},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
     abbr = {{LREC}},
     month = may,
     year = {2018},
     address = {Miyazaki, Japan},
     publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
     url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L18-1343},
     poster = {2018_lrec_bladier_seyffarth_hellwig_petersen_poster.pdf},
     supp = {2018_lrec_bladier_seyffarth_hellwig_petersen_handout.pdf},
     website = {https://aet.phil.hhu.de/}
   }
   
         

2. NAACL-SRW

   Verb Alternations and Their Impact on Frame Induction

   Seyffarth, Esther

   In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop 2018

   Abs Bibtex Poster url

   Frame induction is the automatic creation of frame-semantic resources similar to FrameNet or PropBank, which map lexical units of a language to frame representations of each lexical unit’s semantics. For verbs, these representations usually include a specification of their argument slots and of the selectional restrictions that apply to each slot. Verbs that participate in diathesis alternations have different syntactic realizations whose semantics are closely related, but not identical. We discuss the influence that such alternations have on frame induction, compare several possible frame structures for verbs in the causative alternation, and propose a systematic analysis of alternating verbs that encodes their similarities as well as their differences.

         @inproceedings{seyffarth-2018-verb,
     title = {Verb Alternations and Their Impact on Frame Induction},
     author = {Seyffarth, Esther},
     booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop},
     abbr = {{NAACL-SRW}},
     month = jun,
     year = {2018},
     address = {New Orleans, Louisiana, USA},
     publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
     url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N18-4003},
     doi = {10.18653/v1/N18-4003},
     pages = {17--24},
     poster = {2018_naaclsrw_seyffarth_poster.pdf}
   }