Automatic text summarization is a long-standing task with its origins in summarizing scholarly documents by generating their abstracts. While older approaches mainly focused on generating extractive summaries, recent approaches using neural architectures have helped the task advance towards generating more abstractive, human-like summaries. Yet, the majority of the research in automatic text summarization has focused on summarizing professionally-written news articles due to easier availability of large-scale datasets with ground truth summaries in this domain. Moreover, the inverted pyramid writing style enforced in news articles places crucial information in the top sentences, essentially summarizing it. This allows for a more reliable identification of ground truth for constructing datasets. In contrast, user-generated discourse, such as social media forums or debate portals, has acquired comparably little attention, despite its evident importance. Possible reasons include the challenges posed by the informal nature of user-generated discourse, which often lacks a rigid structure, such as news articles, and the difficulty of obtaining high-quality ground truth summaries for this text register. This thesis aims to address this existing gap by delivering the following novel contributions in the form of datasets, methodologies, and evaluation strategies for automatically summarizing user-generated discourse: (1) three new datasets for the registers of social media posts and argumentative texts containing author-provided ground truth summaries as well as crowdsourced summaries for argumentative texts by adapting theoretical definitions of high-quality summaries; (2) methodologies for creating informative as well as indicative summaries for long discussions of controversial topics; (3) user-centric evaluation processes that emphasize the purpose and provenance of the summary for qualitative assessment of the summarization models; and (4) tools for facilitating the development and evaluation of summarization models that leverage visual analytics and interactive interfaces to enable a fine-grained inspection of the automatically generated summaries in relation to their source documents.:1 Introduction 1.1 Understanding User-Generated Discourse 1.2 The Role of Automatic Summarization 1.3 Research Questions and Contributions 1.4 Thesis Structure 1.5 Publication Record 2 The Task of Text Summarization 2.1 Decoding Human Summarization Practices 2.2 Exploring Automatic Summarization Methods 2.3 Evaluation of Automatic Summarization and its Challenges 2.4 Summary 3 Defining Good Summaries: Examining News Editorials 3.1 Key Characteristics of News Editorials 3.2 Operationalizing High-Quality Summaries 3.3 Evaluating and Ensuring Summary Quality 3.4 Automatic Extractive Summarization of News Editorials 3.5 Summary 4 Mining Social Media for Author-provided Summaries 4.1 Leveraging Human Signals for Summary Identification 4.2 Constructing a Corpus of Abstractive Summaries 4.3 Insights from the TL;DR Challenge 4.4 Summary 5 Generating Conclusions for Argumentative Texts 5.1 Identifying Author-provided Conclusions 5.2 Enhancing Pretrained Models with External Knowledge 5.3 Evaluating Informative Conclusion Generation 5.4 Summary 6 Frame-Oriented Extractive Summarization of Argumentative Discussions 6.1 Importance of Summaries for Argumentative Discussions 6.2 Employing Argumentation Frames as Anchor Points 6.3 Extractive Summarization of Argumentative Discussions 6.4 Evaluation of Extractive Summaries via Relevance Judgments 6.5 Summary 7 Indicative Summarization of Long Discussions 7.1 Table of Contents as an Indicative Summary 7.2 Unsupervised Summarization with Large Language Models 7.3 Comprehensive Analysis of Prompt Engineering 7.4 Purpose-driven Evaluation of Summary Usefulness 7.5 Summary 8 Summary Explorer: Visual Analytics for the Qualitative Assessment of the State of the Art in Text Summarization 8.1 Limitations of Automatic Evaluation Metrics 8.2 Designing Interfaces for Visual Exploration of Summaries 8.3 Corpora, Models, and Case Studies 8.4 Summary 9 SummaryWorkbench: Reproducible Models and Metrics for Text Summarization 9.1 Addressing the Requirements for Summarization Researchers 9.2 AUnified Interface for Applying and Evaluating State-of-the-Art Models and Metrics 9.3 Models and Measures 9.4 Curated Artifacts and Interaction Scenarios 9.5 Interaction Use Cases 9.6 Summary 10 Conclusion 10.1 Key Contributions of the Thesis 10.2 Open Problems and FutureWork

Finding the appropriate level of text for students with varying reading abilities is an important and demanding task for teachers. Radar chart visualisations of text complexity could potentially be an aid in that process, but they need to be evaluated to see if they are intuitive and if they say something about the complexity of a text. This study explores how visualisations of text complexity, in the format of radar charts, are interpreted, what measures they should include and what information they should contain in order to be intelligible for teachers who work with people who have language and/or reading diffi- culties. A preliminary study and three focus group sessions were conducted with teachers from special education schools for adults and gymnasium level. Through thematic analysis of the sessions, five themes were generated and it was found that the visualisations are intelligible to some extent, but they need to be adapted to the target group by making sure the measures are relevant, and that the scale, colours, categories and measures are clearly explained. / Det är både en viktig och krävande uppgift för lärare att hitta lämplig textnivå för elever med varierande läsförmågor. Radardiagramsvisualiseringar av textkomplexitet kan poten- tiellt stötta den processen, men de måste utvärderas för att undersöka om de är intuitiva, vilka mått som bör inkluderas samt om de säger något om komplexiteten av en text. Den här studien utforskar hur visualiseringar av textkomplexitet i form av radardiagram tolkas, vilka mått de bör inkludera samt vilken information de bör innehålla i syfte att vara begripliga för lärare som jobbar med elever med språk och/eller lässvårigheter. En förundersökning och tre fokusgruppsessioner utfördes, med lärare från särgymnasium och särvuxskolor. Efter tematisk analys av data från fokusgrupperna genererades fem teman. Reultaten visade att visualiseringarna var begripliga till viss del, men de behöver anpassas till målgruppen genom att se till att måtten är relevanta samt att skalan, färgerna, kategorierna och måtten är tydligt förklarade.

Diese Dissertation ist der Grammatik als einer historischen Textsorte gewidmet. Grammatik ist nicht nur ein Teil der Sprach(wissenschafts)geschichte Europas, sondern ein sehr wichtiges Instrument der Sprachpolitik, Sprachpflege, Sprachkodifizierung und Sprachlehre. Im Kontext vor allem integrativ ausgerichteter Textsortenlinguistik wird in dieser Dissertation die Grammatik einer historischen Einzelsprache – in diesem Fall des Spanischen – als Darstellung einer Textsorte bzw. Textsortenvariante betrachtet. In Europa hat die Grammatik seit Beginn der Standardisierung gesprochener Volkssprachen und nach dem Vorbild der lateinischen Grammatiken ein eigenes variables Modell der sprachlich-textuellen Gestaltung entwickelt und zeichnet sich durch Multifunktionalität und eine komplexe Struktur aus. Es wird ein theoretisches Analysemodell entwickelt, das diachronische Variation und Wandel der Textsorte „Handbuch Grammatik“ umfassend beschreiben und erklären kann. Das Ziel ist ferner, dieses Modell auf die Analyse des Untersuchungskorpus anzuwenden. Dazu wurden vier Grammatiken der spanischen bzw. kastilischen Sprache ausgewählt, die als Wendewerke der linguistischen Tradition Spaniens anerkannt sind: - „Gramática de la lengua castellana“ von Antonio de Nebrija, 1492 (als erstes vollständig auf Spanisch geschriebenes grammatisches Handbuch des Spanischen); - „Gramática de la lengua castellana“ von Real Academia Española, 1771 (als erste kollektive, akademische Grammatik des Spanischen); - „Gramática de la lengua castellana“ von Academia Española, 1931 (die vorletzte Fassung der Akademiegrammatik, die fast für das gesamte 20. Jahrhundert autoritativ war); - „La nueva gramática de la lengua española“ von Real Academia Española und Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2009-2011 (die letzte Fassung der Akademiegrammatik, basierend auf dem gegenwärtigen Zustand der Sprache des 21. Jahrhunderts und mit Charakter „panhispánico“). / In this thesis grammar is analyzed as a historical text type. Grammar is not only part of language and linguistics’ history but also a very important instrument of language policy, codification, teaching, and glottopolitics as well. In the context of predominantly integrative text-type linguistics, grammar of a single historical language - in this case Spanish - is considered in this work as a realization of a text type or variant of a text type. In Europe grammar has been developing its own variable model of text-structure and is characterized by versatility since the beginning of the standardization of spoken vernacular languages and basing on the model of Latin grammars. A theoretical analysis model is developed the way that it can comprehensively describe and explain the diachronic variation and change of the text type - "Handbuch Grammatik". The aim is also to apply this model to the analysis of the study corpus. For this purpose, four grammars of the Spanish (Castilian) language were selected. These texts are recognized as turning points of the Spanish linguistic tradition: - "Gramática de la lengua castellana" by Antonio de Nebrija, 1492 (as the first grammar manual of Spanish written entirely in Spanish); - "Gramática de la lengua castellana" by Real Academia Española, 1771 (as the first collective Academy grammar of Spanish); - "Gramática de la lengua castellana" by Academia Española, 1931 (the penultimate version of the Academy grammar which has been used for almost the entire 20th century); - "La nueva gramática de la lengua española" by Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2009-2011 (the last version of Academy grammar based on the current state of the language of the 21st century and with the character "panhispánico").

Students in upper secondary school write in a number of different genres, and do this in school contexts as well as in their spare time. The study presented here is an overview of this activity and the genres concerned. The theoretical framework of the study is that of genre theory whereby genre is understood as a socially situated concept. The study is based on 2 000 texts gathered from students on different study programmes all over Sweden in the school year of 1996-97. The texts were written in different situations. The most important distinction made here is between test texts (i.e. texts from national tests) and self-chosen texts, which may come from schoolwriting or spare-time writing. The texts are categorized according to genre. This text inventory shows a repertoire of 33 different genres in the text material. A small number of genres, such as story, book-review and expository essay dominate the school writing. The test genres differ from this pattern in that they clearly imitate texts with a genuine communicative intent. The most frequent genres are studied further and each of them is demonstrated by an interpretative reading. This reading shows that the genres differ considerably with respect to genre character and stability of text structure. A quantitative study of text length and variation in vocabulary further shows that texts written by two categories of students, those on vocationally oriented programmes and those on programmes preparing for higher education, differ significantly. Reference cohesion is studied in a smaller sample of the texts. This lexico-semantic mechanism of cohesion proves to exhibit an interrelation with variation in vocabulary as well as with text type. One particular cohesive tie, inference, shows different patterns in texts written by the two categories of students mentioned above.

In an automotive infotainment system, while analyzing bug reports, developers have to spend significant time on reading log messages and trying to locate anomalous behavior before identifying its root cause. The log messages need to be viewed in a Traceviewer tool to read in a human readable form and have to be extracted to text files by applying manual filters in order to further analyze the behavior. There is a need to evaluate machine learning/data mining methods which could potentially assist in error analysis. One such method could be learning patterns for “normal” messages. “Normal” could even mean that they contain keywords like “exception”, “error”, “failed” but are harmless or not relevant to the bug that is currently analyzed. These patterns could then be applied as a filter, leaving behind only truly anomalous messages that are interesting for analysis. A successful application of the filter would reduce the noise, leaving only a few “anomalous” messages. After evaluation of the researched candidate algorithms, two algorithms namely GSP and FP Growth were found useful and thus implemented together in a prototype. The prototype implementation overall includes processes like pre-processing, creation of input, executing algorithms, creation of training set and analysis of new trace logs. Execution of prototype resulted in reducing manual effort thus achieving the objective of this thesis work.

In this dissertation, we introduce a novel text representation method mainly used for text classification purpose. The presented representation method is initially based on a variety of closeness relationships between pairs of words in text passages within the entire corpus. This representation is then used as the basis for our multi-level lightweight ontological representation method (TOR-FUSE), in which documents are represented based on their contexts and the goal of the learning task. The method is unlike the traditional representation methods, in which all the documents are represented solely based on the constituent words of the documents, and are totally isolated from the goal that they are represented for. We believe choosing the correct granularity of representation features is an important aspect of text classification. Interpreting data in a more general dimensional space, with fewer dimensions, can convey more discriminative knowledge and decrease the level of learning perplexity. The multi-level model allows data interpretation in a more conceptual space, rather than only containing scattered words occurring in texts. It aims to perform the extraction of the knowledge tailored for the classification task by automatic creation of a lightweight ontological hierarchy of representations. In the last step, we will train a tailored ensemble learner over a stack of representations at different conceptual granularities. The final result is a mapping and a weighting of the targeted concept of the original learning task, over a stack of representations and granular conceptual elements of its different levels (hierarchical mapping instead of linear mapping over a vector). Finally the entire algorithm is applied to a variety of general text classification tasks, and the performance is evaluated in comparison with well-known algorithms.

French infinitive is an indefinite verb form which does not reflect the morphological categories of person, number and mode, but is able to express the category of gender and relative chronology. The infinitive is aspect-nonspecific and not able to express tenses, which are related to the moment of realization of speech/discourse. From the syntactic point of view infinitive can act as a primary or secondary predicate. As the secondary predicate, French infinitive is one of the linguistic means capable of forming semi-predicative constructions. In special discourse, due to the above-mentioned characteristic functions, French infinitive serves as an important condenser and also contributes to other requirements of special discourse, its impersonal character and timeless validity.

A tese tem como objetivo o estudo do texto da cidade de Moscou, sua análise comparativa e diálogo com o texto de São Petersburgo, bem como a importância de ambos os textos no processo de formação de identidade cultural russa. A metodologia da pesquisa baseia-se no conceito de texto urbano elaborado por destacados estudiosos da escola semiótica de Tártu-Moscou, tais como: Iúri Lótman, Vladimir Toporov, entre outros. O trabalho apresentado é constituído de três partes: No primeiro capítulo é apresentada a análise teórica dos conceitos de texto e cidade e sua aplicação à Moscou; O segundo capítulo representa uma análise histórico-cultural do processo de formação do texto de Moscou desde a fundação da cidade até o século XXI, a reflexão do texto de Moscou na cultura e, principalmente, na literatura russa; A terceira parte é composta por traduções de alguns ensaios de escritores russos do século XIX nos quais foram descritas as relações controversas entre Moscou e São Petersburgo. A conclusão da presente pesquisa consiste na tese de que tanto o texto de Moscou como sua oposição ao texto de São Petersburgo formam-se como resultado da bipolaridade, própria não apenas da cultura russa, como de toda humanidade. / The thesis aims to study the Moscow city text, its comparative analysis and the dialogue with the St. Petersburg text, and the importance of both texts in the process of formation of Russian cultural identity. The survey methodology is based on the concept of urban text drawn up by prominent scholars of Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, such as Yuri Lotamn, Vladimir Toporov, among others. The work presented is comprised of three parts: The first chapter presents the theoretical analysis of concepts of \"text\" and \"city\" and its application to Moscow; The second chapter represents a cultural-historical analysis of the formation process of the Moscow text since the founding of the city until the 21st century, the reflection of Moscow text in the culture and, mostly in the Russian literature; The third part is composed of translations of some Russian writers´ essays of the 19th century with a description of the controversial relations between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The conclusion of this research consists of the thesis that both Moscow text and its opposition to the St. Petersburg text are formed as a result of a proper bipolarity not only of the Russian culture, but of the whole mankind.

A tese tem como objetivo o estudo do texto da cidade de Moscou, sua análise comparativa e diálogo com o texto de São Petersburgo, bem como a importância de ambos os textos no processo de formação de identidade cultural russa. A metodologia da pesquisa baseia-se no conceito de texto urbano elaborado por destacados estudiosos da escola semiótica de Tártu-Moscou, tais como: Iúri Lótman, Vladimir Toporov, entre outros. O trabalho apresentado é constituído de três partes: No primeiro capítulo é apresentada a análise teórica dos conceitos de texto e cidade e sua aplicação à Moscou; O segundo capítulo representa uma análise histórico-cultural do processo de formação do texto de Moscou desde a fundação da cidade até o século XXI, a reflexão do texto de Moscou na cultura e, principalmente, na literatura russa; A terceira parte é composta por traduções de alguns ensaios de escritores russos do século XIX nos quais foram descritas as relações controversas entre Moscou e São Petersburgo. A conclusão da presente pesquisa consiste na tese de que tanto o texto de Moscou como sua oposição ao texto de São Petersburgo formam-se como resultado da bipolaridade, própria não apenas da cultura russa, como de toda humanidade. / The thesis aims to study the Moscow city text, its comparative analysis and the dialogue with the St. Petersburg text, and the importance of both texts in the process of formation of Russian cultural identity. The survey methodology is based on the concept of urban text drawn up by prominent scholars of Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, such as Yuri Lotamn, Vladimir Toporov, among others. The work presented is comprised of three parts: The first chapter presents the theoretical analysis of concepts of \"text\" and \"city\" and its application to Moscow; The second chapter represents a cultural-historical analysis of the formation process of the Moscow text since the founding of the city until the 21st century, the reflection of Moscow text in the culture and, mostly in the Russian literature; The third part is composed of translations of some Russian writers´ essays of the 19th century with a description of the controversial relations between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The conclusion of this research consists of the thesis that both Moscow text and its opposition to the St. Petersburg text are formed as a result of a proper bipolarity not only of the Russian culture, but of the whole mankind.

Dass die Textlinguistik nicht umhin kommt, ihre Beschreibungen und ihr Instrumentarium auch im Hinblick auf Texte zu überprüfen, die nicht von Muttersprachlern erzeugt worden sind, ist durch die wachsenden Bedürfnisse nach fremdsprachiger Kommunikation und die rapide steigende Zahl entsprechender kommunikativer Ereignisse bedingt. Der Fokus der vorliegenden Publikation liegt auf dem fremdsprachigen Text (vorzugsweise in seiner schriftlichen, monologischen Ausprägung) als sprachlicher Größe liegen. Bei der Analyse fremdsprachiger Texte werden neben textlinguistischen Fragen aber auch andere Gesichtspunkte berücksichtigt: soziolinguistische Aspekte, z.B. in Bezug auf die Kommunikationspartner, die kommunikativen Domänen, den sozial-historischen Rahmen der Kommunikation usw., psycholinguistische Hintergründe, z.B. im Hinblick auf die kognitive Verarbeitung fremdsprachlich-kommunikativer Anforderungen, literaturwissenschaftliche Bezüge, etwa hinsichtlich fremdsprachiger Einflüsse auf literarische Werke und ihre Rolle im literarischen Diskurs, translationswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte im Hinblick auf die Adaptation und Bewahrung des Fremden im übersetzten Text sowie pädagogisch-didaktische Fragen im Rahmen des gesteuerten Fremdsprachenerwerbs. / Owing to the growing necessity for foreign language interaction and the rapidly increasing number of associated communicative events, it is essential for text linguistics also to test its categories and methodology on texts which have not been produced by native speakers. The focus of the present publication lies on the foreign language text (primarily on its written, monological form) which is conceived as a linguistic entity. However, alongside textlinguistic issues the analysis of foreign language texts also entails a consideration of the following parameters: sociolinguistic aspects, e.g. with regard to the communicative partners, communicative domains, social-historic framework of the communicative situation etc.; psycholinguistic aspects, e.g. with respect to the cognitive processing of foreign language communication tasks; literary aspects, e.g. with regard to foreign language influences on literary works and their role in literary discourse; translatory aspects concerning the adaptation and preservation of foreign cultural elements in a translated text and pedagogical-didactic questions concerning foreign language teaching.