Project page
I've been involved in a number of research projects. This page serves as pointer to those projects. They are listed in alphabetical order.
Alphabetical project list
When projects have both character-number combinations and titles, I am using the character-number keys, rather than the titles, to sort them.
Teilprojekt A1 of the SFB 441 (1999-2001)
The topic of this project was Repräsentation und Erschließung linguistischer Daten, and I was working with Manfred Sailer on questions of how to represent linguistic data.
Teilprojekt A5 of the SFB 441 (2002-2008)
This is a project which started in the second phase of the
SFB 441. We investigated irregularities
and idiosyncracies in natural languages which have traditionally
caused many analytical problems for formal theories of grammar.
Together with
Laura Kallmeyer's Emmy Noether Nachwuchsgruppe, we hosted the semantics
workshop Tübinger Welten, Ereignisse, Situationen und Zeiten on
June 23rd, 2006.
Teilprojekt B05 of the SFB 1629 (2024-)
The ongoing project aims at reconciling the common assumption of concentric Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing contexts (antimorphic ⊂ anti-additive ⊂ downward-entailing ⊂ ...) with apparently unlicensed exceptions and with the much more fine-grained distributional profiles observed in corpus-based research. Whereas classical theories mainly concern licensing by at-issue content, we investigate NPI licensing by non-at-issue content. This leads to a better understanding of the relation between explicit (morpho-syntactically marked) negation and implicit negation (by conventionalized association). The hypothesis is that strong NPIs require a strong (anti-additive) licenser, but the licenser can be at-issue or non-at-issue. Weak NPIs accept a weak (e.g., downward-entailing) licenser, though their licensing must follow from the computation of the at-issue content.
Teilprojekt B8 of the SFB 340 (1995-2000)
B8 was concerned with the implementation of a fragment of German in HPSG. In B8 we did research on building implementation platforms for HPSG grammars, the logical foundations of HPSG, and various empirical linguistic phenomena in German. The people in the HPSG group of the SFB 340 included Mike Calcagno, Kordula De Kuthy, Frederik Fouvry, Thilo Götz, John Griffith, Paul John King, Detmar Meurers, Guido Minnen, Gerald Penn, Manfred Sailer, Markus Steinbach, Beata Trawinski, Jesse Tseng, and Heike Winhart.
BulTreeBank (2001-August 2004)
In the BulTreeBank project Kiril Simov and his colleagues in Sofia developed an HPSG-based syntactic treebank of Bulgarian. The SfS in Tübingen collaborated with the research group in Sofia on various issues concerning the development of the Bulgarian treebank. I spent some time at the Bulgarian Academy of Science as a visitor in spring 2001.
CLAIRE (1999-2002)
CLAIRE (Constraint Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Review and Evaluation) was a collaborative research project between the SfS and the Computational Linguistics/Machine Translation Group (CL/MT Group) of the University of Essex in England. CLAIRE was conducting a comparative study of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).
The CLaRK Programme (1998-2000)
The CLaRK programme was a graduate programme for students from central and eastern Europe, which we conducted with colleagues in Bulgaria. Please visit the CLaRK pages to find out more about what this was all about. There even were two Summer Schools!
CoGETI: Forschungsnetzwerk Constraintbasierte Grammatik (2005-2010)
The CoGETI network consisted of a group of researchers from five German
universities who share interests in the development of constraint-based
grammars. Details about the goals of the network and its structure can
be found on the CoGETI web pages.
My
project A5
at the SFB 441 hosted the
CoGETI Workshop on Negative Polarity Items
in early February 2006.
Deep semantic constraint-based processing of Polish (2004-2005)
The research in our project on Polish was conducted by Adam Przepiórkowski at the Linguistic Engineering Group at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw, and myself. The purpose of this project was to investigate certain phenomena of Polish which are particularly challenging for linguistic analysis and processing, and to implement a fragment of Polish.
Kahina (2008-2013)
With substantial software contributions by Martin Lazarov, Johannes Dellert, Kilian Evang and I have been working on a comprehensive graphical grammar development environment called Kahina for logic programming and grammar development in the TRALE system. The project was initially funded by a Karl-Steinbuch-Stipendium for Johannes and Kilian. Important Kahina modules that were not covered by this stipend were supported by very substantial software development money provided by Stefan Müller, Gert Webelhuth, and Detmar Meurers.
MiLCA, Teilprojekt Grammar Formalisms and Parsing (2001-2003)
Medienintensive Lehrmodule in der Computerlinguistik-Ausbildung (MiLCA) started in summer 2001 and ran through 2003. I directed a project in the MiLCA consortium (Modul A4, Grammatikformalismen und Parsing - Grammar Formalisms and Parsing) that designed a course in HPSG covering the mathematical foundations, linguistic theorizing, and the implementation of HPSG grammars in the TRALE system.
Strukturfonds/Projektförderung (2002-2003)
From July 2002 through July 2003 the Strukturfonds of the University of Tübingen funded a project in which we were creating on-line resources on HPSG and started a co-operation with Gerald Penn of the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto on the efficient implementation of a new combinatorial system for model-theoretic semantics in TRALE. The result of the project (besides publications) was the first prototype of an implementation of Lexical Resource Semantics. The research in this project was conducted by Manfred Sailer, Gerald Penn and myself.
Verbmobil (1993-2000)
This was a project about machine translation of spoken dialogues from German to Japanese and vice versa. I was involved in designing a Baumbank (tree bank) for German.
VisaS (2016-2019)
VisaS (German: Visualisierung akademischer Schreibkompetenz) - Visualization of academic writing skills - was an interdisciplinary project aimed at developing software to assist students in acquiring academic writing skills by providing a qualitative analysis of their texts.
Frank Richter