Erik Körner


2022

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Crawling Under-Resourced Languages - a Portal for Community-Contributed Corpus Collection
Erik Körner | Felix Helfer | Christopher Schröder | Thomas Eckart | Dirk Goldhahn
Proceedings of the Workshop on Dataset Creation for Lower-Resourced Languages within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The “Web as corpus” paradigm opens opportunities for enhancing the current state of language resources for endangered and under-resourced languages. However, standard crawling strategies tend to overlook available resources of these languages in favor of already well-documented ones. Since 2016, the “Crawling Under-Resourced Languages” portal (CURL) has been contributing to bridging the gap between established crawling techniques and knowledge about relevant Web resources that is only available in the specific language communities. The aim of the CURL portal is to enlarge the amount of available text material for under-resourced languages thereby developing available datasets further and to use them as a basis for statistical evaluation and enrichment of already available resources. The application is currently provided and further developed as part of the thematic cluster “Non-Latin scripts and Under-resourced languages” in the German national research consortium Text+. In this context, its focus lies on the extraction of text material and statistical information for the data domain “Lexical resources”.

2021

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On Classifying whether Two Texts are on the Same Side of an Argument
Erik Körner | Gregor Wiedemann | Ahmad Dawar Hakimi | Gerhard Heyer | Martin Potthast
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

To ease the difficulty of argument stance classification, the task of same side stance classification (S3C) has been proposed. In contrast to actual stance classification, which requires a substantial amount of domain knowledge to identify whether an argument is in favor or against a certain issue, it is argued that, for S3C, only argument similarity within stances needs to be learned to successfully solve the task. We evaluate several transformer-based approaches on the dataset of the recent S3C shared task, followed by an in-depth evaluation and error analysis of our model and the task’s hypothesis. We show that, although we achieve state-of-the-art results, our model fails to generalize both within as well as across topics and domains when adjusting the sampling strategy of the training and test set to a more adversarial scenario. Our evaluation shows that current state-of-the-art approaches cannot determine same side stance by considering only domain-independent linguistic similarity features, but appear to require domain knowledge and semantic inference, too.

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Casting the Same Sentiment Classification Problem
Erik Körner | Ahmad Dawar Hakimi | Gerhard Heyer | Martin Potthast
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

We introduce and study a problem variant of sentiment analysis, namely the “same sentiment classification problem”, where, given a pair of texts, the task is to determine if they have the same sentiment, disregarding the actual sentiment polarity. Among other things, our goal is to enable a more topic-agnostic sentiment classification. We study the problem using the Yelp business review dataset, demonstrating how sentiment data needs to be prepared for this task, and then carry out sequence pair classification using the BERT language model. In a series of experiments, we achieve an accuracy above 83% for category subsets across topics, and 89% on average.

2020

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Usability and Accessibility of Bantu Language Dictionaries in the Digital Age: Mobile Access in an Open Environment
Thomas Eckart | Sonja Bosch | Uwe Quasthoff | Erik Körner | Dirk Goldhahn | Simon Kaleschke
Proceedings of the first workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages

This contribution describes a free and open mobile dictionary app based on open dictionary data. A specific focus is on usability and user-adequate presentation of data. This includes, in addition to the alphabetical lemma ordering, other vocabulary selection, grouping, and access criteria. Beyond search functionality for stems or roots – required due to the morphological complexity of Bantu languages – grouping of lemmas by subject area of varying difficulty allows customization. A dictionary profile defines available presentation options of the dictionary data in the app and can be specified according to the needs of the respective user group. Word embeddings and similar approaches are used to link to semantically similar or related words. The underlying data structure is open for monolingual, bilingual or multilingual dictionaries and also supports the connection to complex external resources like Wordnets. The application in its current state focuses on Xhosa and Zulu dictionary data but more resources will be integrated soon.

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Typical Sentences as a Resource for Valence
Uwe Quasthoff | Lars Hellan | Erik Körner | Thomas Eckart | Dirk Goldhahn | Dorothee Beermann
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Verb valence information can be derived from corpora by using subcorpora of typical sentences that are constructed in a language independent manner based on frequent POS structures. The inspection of typical sentences with a fixed verb in a certain position can show the valence information directly. Using verb fingerprints, consisting of the most typical sentence patterns the verb appears in, we are able to identify standard valence patterns and compare them against a language’s valence profile. With a very limited number of training data per language, valence information for other verbs can be derived as well. Based on the Norwegian valence patterns we are able to find comparative patterns in German where typical sentences are able to express the same situation in an equivalent way and can so construct verb valence pairs for a bilingual PolyVal dictionary. This contribution discusses this application with a focus on the Norwegian valence dictionary NorVal.