In this paper we present UPAppliedCL’s contribution to the GermEval 2021 Shared Task. In particular, we participated in Subtasks 2 (Engaging Comment Classification) and 3 (Fact-Claiming Comment Classification). While acceptable results can be obtained by using unigrams or linguistic features in combination with traditional machine learning models, we show that for both tasks transformer models trained on fine-tuned BERT embeddings yield best results.

The quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key factor in the digitisation of historical documents. OCR errors are a major obstacle for downstream tasks and have hindered advances in the usage of the digitised documents. In this paper we present a two-step approach to automatic OCR post-correction. The first component is responsible for detecting erroneous sequences in a set of OCRed texts, while the second is designed for correcting OCR errors in them. We show that applying the preceding detection model reduces both the character error rate (CER) compared to a simple one-step correction model and the amount of falsely changed correct characters.

Notwithstanding the increasing role Twitter plays in modern political and social discourse, resources built for conducting argument mining on tweets remain limited. In this paper, we present a new corpus of German tweets annotated for argument components. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first corpus containing not only annotated full tweets but also argumentative spans within tweets. We further report first promising results using supervised classification (F1: 0.82) and sequence labeling (F1: 0.72) approaches.