All posts by Frank

Gerald Penn from University of Toronto in Frankfurt

After a forced hiatus of three years a regular visitor is back at Goethe Universität: Gerald Penn will stay in Frankfurt for six weeks this summer. He will be working with us on the grammar implementation platform we use extensively in teaching and in research, the TRALE system. Our goal is to improve the usability of our interactive server architecture for displaying grammars and syntactic as well as semantic analyses of sentences for students. We are also planning  to extend the sub-module for type-logical semantic analysis of English expressions. This work focuses on obtaining more readable output of semantic representations for non-experts, and to reach a state of the system that allows us to connect logical inference engines and model builders to TRALE. Along the way, many practical aspects of the software stack needed in day-to-day work with a sizeable grammar implementation platform with users around the world will be addressed, such as a new git repository for TRALE, a bug tracking site, and extended debugging tools.

Richter in Düsseldorf

Frank Richter was invited for a talk at Laura Kallmeyer’s computational linguistics group at Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf on January 30, 2020. Frank’s presentation on Idiom Modification, based on work with Berit Gehrke and Sascha Bargmann, was investigating corpus data with a particular kind of modified idiom which displays its usual idiomatic reading but also a literal interpretation of that part of it that is targeted by modification. A classical example of this kind of construction is Ernst’s (1981) In spite of the treatment the other refugees received from the rescue party in the desert, he bit his thirst-swollen tongue and kept to himself. Here the modifier thirst-swollen does not belong to the idiomatic expression in which it is embedded (to bite one’s tongue), and it triggers a literal interpretation of the noun tongue, which at the same time belongs to the idiomatic expression. Ernst called these peculiar cases of idiom modification conjunction modification. Corpus studies reveal that the phenomenon is more widespread than one might expect, and the data are clearly a lot of fun.

Niko Schenk Contributes to Beta Writer

In early April the international and German press and other media reported on the publication of the first software-generated scientific book, a volume which summarizes state of the art research on lithium-ion batteries and appeared with Springer Nature. One of the creators of Beta Writer, the software behind the book, is Niko Schenk, who works and teaches linguistics at IEAS and is simultaneously  affiliated with the Applied Computational Linguistics Lab in the computer science department. We linguists at IEAS are all very excited about his work and its impact!

If you are interested in the technology and in the challenges posed by the automatic generation of research books, the introduction to the freely available electronic version of the book gives an overview on the ongoing research in this area.

Gerald Penn visiting (again)

Gerald Penn from the University of Toronto came back to Frankfurt this summer for an entire month of intense implementation work on CLLRS, the constraint language that gives a computational interpretation to Lexical Resource Semantics (LRS). LRS is the  semantic framework that we use in teaching introductory semantics, and it is developed actively in various ongoing research projects. Continue reading Gerald Penn visiting (again)

Tilman Höhle’s Gesammelte Schriften

Earlier this week the open access publisher Language Science Press published a complete collection of papers by Tilman Höhle, edited by Stefan Müller, Marga Reis and Frank Richter. Tilman Höhle wrote a significant number of highly influential papers on German grammar (and on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) from the early 80s until the beginning of the millenium. Among the topics covered are Continue reading Tilman Höhle’s Gesammelte Schriften

Gerald Penn Visits IEAS

Gerald Penn from the University of Toronto is staying at IEAS for three weeks to work with Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, Niko Schenk, and Frank Richter on several extensions of the TRALE grammar implementation system.

TRALE is at the heart of various long-term projects we are pursuing at the linguistics department. Most visibly, it provides the underlying software platform for the online grammars which Gert Webelhuth uses throughout his syntax courses. In order to make the graphical user interface of the online grammars in those classes more intuitive, Continue reading Gerald Penn Visits IEAS

Semantic Fiction

The murder of Richard Montague, disruptive innovator in the thriving field of formal semantics (as he might be called by advertising companies today), is an unsolved police case. His theories of natural language, and their many successors, are of course still taught today, as any student in our semantics courses can tell you. For taking some time off from the intellectual effort that it takes to come to grips with logical languages, without leaving the topic altogether, there is an exciting option: A few years ago, Aifric Campbell published a murder mystery, The Semantics of Murder, which is constructed around the real-world events surrounding the life of Richard Montague. Here’s your exceptional chance to enjoy a structural analysis of a higher-order quantificational formula in a relaxing environment – as a student of semantics you might want to check out page 58 of the 2008 softcover edition right away!

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Dianne Jonas in Iceland

Dianne Jonas is again heading north to Iceland, where she will be giving a talk on `The Morphosyntax of the verb tykja in Faroese – a Diachronic and Comparative Perspective’. Her presentation is part of a meeting organized by Háskóla Íslands og Fróðskaparseturs í
Færeyjum (University of Iceland and University of the Faroe Islands).