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

Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksArticle in conference proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Authors

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.
Translated title of the contributionErforschung der Verwendung des Pronomen Ich in deutschen akademischen Texten mit maschinellem Lernen
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInformatik 2020 - Back to the future : 50. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik vom 28. September - 2. Oktober 2020, virtual
EditorsRalf H. Reussner, Anne Koziolek, Robert Heinrich
Number of pages7
Place of PublicationBonn
PublisherGesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
Publication date2020
Pages1327-1333
ISBN (electronic)978-3-88579-701-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event50th Annual Conference of the German Informatics Society - INFORMATIK 2020: Back to the Future - Online, Karlsruhe, Germany
Duration: 28.09.202002.10.2020
Conference number: 50
https://informatik2020.gi.de/

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Melanie Andresen’s work on this paper was funded by the Landesforschungsförderung Hamburg in the context of the project hermA [Ga17] (LFF-FV 35) at Universitčt Hamburg.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved.

    Research areas

  • Language Studies - annotation, Academic language, German, machine learning, classification
  • Academic language, Annotation, Classification, German, Machine learning

DOI