TY - CHAP

T1 - Exploring the Use of the Pronoun I in German Academic Texts with Machine Learning

AU - Andresen, Melanie

AU - Knorr, Dagmar

N1 - Conference code: 50

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - The use of the pronoun ich (‘I’) in academic language is a source of constant debate and a frequent cause of insecurity for students. We explore manually annotated instances of I from a German learner corpus. Using machine learning techniques, we investigate to what extent it is possible to automatically distinguish between different types of I usage (author I vs. narrator I). We additionally inspect which context words are good indicators of one type or the other. The results show that an automatic classification is not straightforward, but the distinctive features are in line with previous research. The results of the automatic classification are not perfect, but would greatly facilitate manual annotation. The distinctive words are in line with previous research and indicate that the author I is a more homogeneous class.

AB - The use of the pronoun ich (‘I’) in academic language is a source of constant debate and a frequent cause of insecurity for students. We explore manually annotated instances of I from a German learner corpus. Using machine learning techniques, we investigate to what extent it is possible to automatically distinguish between different types of I usage (author I vs. narrator I). We additionally inspect which context words are good indicators of one type or the other. The results show that an automatic classification is not straightforward, but the distinctive features are in line with previous research. The results of the automatic classification are not perfect, but would greatly facilitate manual annotation. The distinctive words are in line with previous research and indicate that the author I is a more homogeneous class.

KW - Language Studies

KW - Korpuslinguistik

KW - annotation

KW - Academic language

KW - German

KW - machine learning

KW - classification

KW - Academic language

KW - Annotation

KW - Classification

KW - German

KW - Machine learning

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85127357898&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/74ed2ea8-4157-36bd-9677-24ac22c76c5e/

U2 - 10.18420/inf2020_124

DO - 10.18420/inf2020_124

M3 - Article in conference proceedings

T3 - Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) – Proceedings

SP - 1327

EP - 1333

BT - Informatik 2020 - Back to the future

A2 - Reussner, Ralf H.

A2 - Koziolek, Anne

A2 - Heinrich, Robert

PB - Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.

CY - Bonn

T2 - 50th Annual Conference of the German Informatics Society - INFORMATIK 2020

Y2 - 28 September 2020 through 2 October 2020

ER -