By the end of this century, half of the approximately 6000 extant languages will cease to be transmitted from one generation to the next. The field of language documentation seeks to make a record of endangered languages before they reach the point of extinction, while they are still in use. The work of documenting and describing a language is difficult and extremely time-consuming, and resources are extremely limited. Developing efficient methods for making lasting records of languages may increase the amount of documentation achieved within budget restrictions. This thesis approaches the problem from the perspective of computational linguistics, asking whether and how automated language processing can reduce human annotation effort when very little labeled data is available for model training. The task addressed is morpheme labeling for the Mayan language Uspanteko, and we test the effectiveness of two complementary types of machine support: (a) learner-guided selection of examples for annotation (active learning); and (b) annotator access to the predictions of the learned model (semi-automated annotation). Active learning (AL) has been shown to increase efficacy of annotation effort for many different tasks. Most of the reported results, however, are from studies which simulate annotation, often assuming a single, infallible oracle. In our studies, crucially, annotation is not simulated but rather performed by human annotators. We measure and record the time spent on each annotation, which in turn allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of machine support in terms of actual annotation effort. We report three main findings with respect to active learning. First, in order for efficiency gains reported from active learning to be meaningful for realistic annotation scenarios, the type of cost measurement used to gauge those gains must faithfully reflect the actual annotation cost. Second, the relative effectiveness of different selection strategies in AL seems to depend in part on the characteristics of the annotator, so it is important to model the individual oracle or annotator when choosing a selection strategy. And third, the cost of labeling a given instance from a sample is not a static value but rather depends on the context in which it is labeled. We report two main findings with respect to semi-automated annotation. First, machine label suggestions have the potential to increase annotator efficacy, but the degree of their impact varies by annotator, with annotator expertise a likely contributing factor. At the same time, we find that implementation and interface must be handled very carefully if we are to accurately measure gains from semi-automated annotation. Together these findings suggest that simulated annotation studies fail to model crucial human factors inherent to applying machine learning strategies in real annotation settings. / text

In the last years a rapid emergence of lexical resources has evolved in the Semantic Web. Whereas most of the linguistic information is already machine-readable, we found that morphological information is mostly absent or only contained in semi-structured strings. An integration of morphemic data has not yet been undertaken due to the lack of existing domain-specific ontologies and explicit morphemic data. In this paper, we present the Multilingual Morpheme Ontology called MMoOn Core which can be regarded as the first comprehensive ontology for the linguistic domain of morphological language data. It will be described how crucial concepts like morphs, morphemes, word forms and meanings are represented and interrelated and how language-specific morpheme inventories can be created as a new possibility of morphological datasets. The aim of the MMoOn Core ontology is to serve as a shared semantic model for linguists and NLP researchers alike to enable the creation, conversion, exchange, reuse and enrichment of morphological language data across different data-dependent language sciences. Therefore, various use cases are illustrated to draw attention to the cross-disciplinary potential which can be realized with the MMoOn Core ontology in the context of the existing Linguistic Linked Data research landscape.

Jitka Nešporová doctoral thesis ABSTRACT The doctoral thesis focuses on the translation persona and work of Ludvík Kundera. A poet himself, he translated verse first and foremost and was able to do so from many languages, although he sometimes resorted to the use of interlinear translations. The research, however, concentrates primarily on the description, analysis and reception of his direct translations in the Czech - German language pair, which was predominant in Kundera's translation work. The thesis contributes to the understanding of the history of Czech literary translation after 1945 by describing Kundera's translation method, making accessible part of his literary estate, notably his correspondence, and providing an update to Kundera's translation bibliography. Kundera is best known as the exclusive, authorized translator of Bertolt Brecht's drama and poetry. His translations of Expressionists Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn, for which he received the State Award for Literary Translation in 1996, are considered canonical today. The same holds true for his translations of Paul Celan's poetry and Alfred Kubin's novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side). Kundera was also the first to introduce Czech readers to the poetry of Alsatian Dadaist Hans Arp and the poetry of East German lyricist Peter Huchel....