Welcome
Welcome at the site of the department for computational linguistics. With linguistics und information science we are a department of the institut for language and information at the philosophical faculty of the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. The department has a chair for computational linguistics, which is beset by Prof. Dr. Laura Kallmeyer since 2011. Alongside Dr. Wiebke Petersen has a junior professorship for mathematical linguistics and there around 15 additional people in our staff for research and teaching. In our degree program we have the bachelor and master programs linguistics as well as information science and language technology. Conferral of a doctorate is possible as well. In research we are engaged in the CRC 991 with 4 projects and have 4 further projects in addition. Our topics in research and teaching include weak contextsentive grammar formalisms, finite state techniques, statistical machine translation and knowledge representation based on frames.
Current news
We organize the ESSLLI 2013 - the 25th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information which will take place in Düsseldorf.
5.-16. August 2013
Talk announcement
Roland Meyer (HU Berlin)
"Grammatical Change vs. Loans from the West: A Corpus Study of Relative and Complement Clauses in Pre-Modern Russian"
Thursday, 06.06.2013, 14.30 in room 23.21.02.54
Abstract:
The grammar of relative and complement clause marking is more variable than one might think, in many European languages and varieties. This also holds for Pre-Modern Russian. In this talk, I argue that the present-day standard relative clause construction arose under influence from Polish and early East Slavic, in the 17th century. Historical data show, moreover, that there is a plausible diachronic link between relative and complement clause marking throughout the history of North Slavic. This linguistic point of the talk is based on intense "bottom-up" work with historical textual sources, from digitization through annotation (manual and automatic) towards statistic evaluation. At least at two points, more refined corpus-linguistic methods are instrumental for the analysis: First, the use of word alignment for tracking the development of complementizers and relative markers over time suggests itself, because many of the texts are available in aligned modern Russian translations. Second, the varieties of Church Slavic vs. East Slavic need to be kept apart, because they differ strongly in their marking of relative and complement clauses. To this end, texts are run through an Old Church Slavic morphological analyzer and classified according to its success rate. Apart from its narrow linguistic argument, the talk thus, more generally, presents and illustrates (some) corpus- and computational linguistic methods in the practice of working with historical texts.
Video interview with Laura Kallmeyer
