German Texts Research Articles

Normalizing Swiss German Dialects with the Power of Large Language Models

Swiss German dialects pose significant challenges for natural language processing (NLP) applications, due to their lack of standard orthography, linguistic diversity, and scarcity of annotated data. We introduce a novel method for normalizing Swiss German text to Standard German by employing the mT5 model, a cutting-edge large language model (LLM) that can perform various text-to-text transformations across multiple languages. Our approach not only aims to enhance the processing of Swiss German dialects but also seeks to broaden the understanding of the adaptability of pre-trained LLMs in the realm of dialect normalization. By fine-tuning the mT5 model across its small, base, and large variants with the SwissDial dataset under various hyperparameter settings, we evaluated the performance of these models using the character n-gram F-score (ChrF) and the COMET metrics. The results demonstrated that the mT5 model, particularly its smallest variant, can achieve high-quality normalization of Swiss German dialects with minimal performance differences between the model sizes. This indicates that the SwissDial dataset is sufficiently extensive for effective fine-tuning, suggesting that even less resource-intensive models are viable for this task. Our findings advocate for the potential of LLMs, like mT5, as powerful instruments for dialect normalization and other NLP challenges, offering a promising alternative to traditional methods.

Novels 1914-1916 to the General Civil Code of the Austrian Empire 1811

The article is devoted to clarifying the reasons and prerequisites for the adoption of the Novels of 1914-1916 to the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811, a general characterization of their content and substantiation of their historical and legal significance.
 The author analyzed the state of problem processing; first of all, the author used the works of two professors of Lviv University of 20th century - the outstanding Polish civilian Ernest Till, who published the German text and the Polish translation of the Novel with his own explanations, as well as the prominent Ukrainian jurist Stanislav Dnistrіanskyі, who in 1919 translated the Code of 1811 and three Novels to it into Ukrainian. At the same time, the main attention in the article is given to the figure of the Austrian lawyer and statesman, professor of the University of Vienna, Joseph Unger, who presented the program of novelization of the Code of 1811 in his article of 1904 and later acted as its main developer at the head of the Special Commission.
 The author revealed the decisive influence of J. Unger on the spread of the historical school of law in the legal science of the Austrian monarchy, including its fundamental provisions regarding the reception of Roman law, the tradition of German pandectism; and, instead, critics of the theory of natural law; as well as on the introduction by scientists of a comparative legal approach in Austrian civil studies, thanks to which the reform of the General Civil Code of the Austrian Empire in 1811 was initiated. The author considered the 10-year codification process of changing the Code, which resulted in its novelization in 1914-1916.
 Therefore, the article elaborates the main content of the three Novels to the Code: the First Novel of October 12, 1914, the Second Novel of July 22, 1915, and the Third Novel of March 19, 1916, which made certain changes to personal, family, property, inheritance and obligation law. At the same time, the author stated that the revision of the General Civil Code of the Austrian Empire in 1811 did not fundamentally change its structure, nor the main principles and provisions, but was only aimed at adapting the Code to the contemporary conditions and needs.

Текстоспецифические способы словообразования в русском и немецком языках (сравнение фикциональных и фактуальных текстов)

This article seeks to determine whether different kinds of word formation can serve as a criterion for the classification and characterization of different text types and to what extent this criterion is dependent on a particular language. In order to demonstrate the role of word formation, the study analyzes fictional texts (fairy tales) and factual texts (instruction manuals) with respect to what kinds and types of word formation are specific for these types of texts in Russian and German. The analysis shows that although the text-distinguishing function of kinds of word formation is manifested in both languages, in Russian it is expressed to a lesser extent than in German. The reason for this is that the basic kinds of word formation are less evenly distributed in the Russian language than in German.

The German geschweige denn construction

Abstract The corresponding German construction to English let alone is geschweige denn with a meaning of ‘and even more/less so’. For present-day German, the construction is described as a coordinating conjunction, the use of which is tied to certain usage conditions, such as negative contexts. The construction is idiomatic and can be described as a form-function pairing in a Construction Grammar framework. This paper describes the origin and development of the idiomatic construction from a diachronic perspective. The data analyzed comes from the core corpus of the German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv; DTA), occasionally complemented by the extension corpora of the DTA. It is shown that the construction evolves from verb phrases such as ich geschweige (‘I remain silent’), which are often used with a genitive complement or a dass-clause complement (‘that-clause’). One crucial aspect of the development of the coordinating conjunction is the loss of the filling of the nominative complement, usually ich (‘I’), with geschweige and the loss of ge- prefixes in inflected verb forms, which gradually leads to a change of the verb form to ich schweige, while the conjunction fossilizes the form prefixed with ge-. Furthermore, over time, the coordinating conjunction denn wins against the competition by dann and other words to form geschweige denn. The paper also traces the development of the idiomatic verb phrase ganz zu schweigen von, which happens in parallel to that of geschweige denn.

La separación de los esposos vista por la mujer en la literatura caballeresca germánica y romance de la Edad Media: un análisis comparado

Marriage and the relationship between husband and wife in medieval literature have often been analyzed from many different points of view. However, there is an aspect which remains unexplored and this is the analysis from a discursive perspective of the conversation between the knight and his lady before he departs in search of adventures, war or whatever other reason. This study aims to verify if there is any kind of coincidence or similarity in the arguments used by the lady in different texts, when she tries to stop her husband from leaving. Therefore, in the present study conversations concerning the departing of a knight from his lady shall be analyzed in Icelandic, German, French, Catalan and Spanish chivalric texts of the Middle Ages, taking into account the consequences of the knight’s departure for the lady, for the knight and for the marriage bond itself. A detailed analysis of the lady’s arguments intending to keep the knight by her side seems to lead to a hypothesis concerning the existence of similar arguments across literary texts in different languages.

STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE TITLES IN GRIMMSʼ FAIRY TALES

Grimmsʼ fairy tales are fairy tales collected in German lands and literarily processed by the great germanists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. They were included in the collection «Children’s and Household Tales» (German: «Kinder- und Hausmärchen»), originally published in 1812. Thanks to their depth and wonderful plots, these fairy tales have not lost popularity for several centuries and are read with pleasure by adults and children. The purpose of the research was to identify and describe the structural and semantic features of the titles, formulated by the German storytellers.
 The relevance. In the modern world of information, the title requires comprehensive research, since it is a key element of the deep part of the text content structure and orients the reader in the world of literature and journalism.
 The scientific novelty. In linguistics there is no consideration of the titles in Grimmsʼ fairy tales, their semantic and structural features.
 The research material. The titles of the most famous and popular fairy tales of German storytellers from the Kinder- und Hausmärchen collection.
 In the research the general scientific and linguistic methods were applied: descriptive method, method of classification and systematization, elements of structural and semantic analysis and quantitative calculation.
 The scope of application. The research can be used in the study and teaching of the style of the German language, pragmatics and text interpretation.
 The results. The author names the structural features of the titles in Grimmsʼ fairy tales, gives a percentage of the number of title-words, title-phrases, title-sentences, lists their semantic features, focuses on complex words, talking names, numerals, appellatives, diminutive suffixes, as well as on the facts from the plot of the fairy tale that the reader can already learn from the title.

The Present Participle with Wērden and Wēsen in Middle Low German: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Structure and Meaning

A comprehensive description of the combination of the finite auxiliary verbs wērden ‘become’/wēsen ‘be’ and a present participle in Middle Low German is still a strong desideratum. This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the aforementioned phenomenon with a special focus on its grammatical structure and its different meanings. In particular, it focuses on a wide range of temporal and aspectual meanings, depending on the auxiliary verb, its tense and mood. Moreover, the relationship between the semantics of the main verb and the meaning of the whole construction is investigated. Finally, the competition with alternative verbal complex constructions expressing the same meaning is also explored. The analysis is carried out on the basis of Middle Low German texts from different times, language areas, and genres.

Балтийские заимствования в Stratagema Oeconomicum С. Губерта и их лексические эквиваленты

The German-language guide Stratagema Oeconomicum, oder Acker-Student by Salomon Gubert contains numerous words from the spheres of agriculture, farming and housekeeping, including colloquial object names that were used by peasants of the Baltic region in the 17th century. In the Russian translation – Liflyandskaya ekonomiya (Economy of Livonia) – signed by Mikhail Lomonosov, fragments with Baltic borrowings are abridged. Using data from scientific, reference and archival literature, we can clarify the referential attribution of some Baltic borrowings and their synonyms in the German text, as well as draw conclusions about the relationship between them and their Russian equivalents. For instance, the combination Dwessel laike refers to the pagan peasant holiday in remembrance of the deceased relatives and their souls, mentioned in 16th-century texts; Zirzing ‘cricket’ is a synonym for Embten and Grylle, while Skudra ‘ant’ is a synonym for Ameise and Formica; the name Szuring, as well as its colloquial German equivalents Flöhe-Kraut Persikaria and Schmertzkern Persikaria, most likely refer to water pepper (Polygonum hydropyper L.), a medicinal plant. In the Russian translation of excerpts containing colloquial borrowed names, numerous errors can be found, as well as cases when these names are not translated at all, which most likely indicates that these words and phrases presented difficulties to the translator. In some cases, the omission of parts of the original text does not significantly change the meaning, while in others, it distorts the practical recommendations given in the book.

Traduzindo o generic “man”: um estudo de caso das duas traduções alemãs dos provérbios em No Longer at Ease, de Achebe

Previous research on translation of proverbs have dealt with techniques and strategies of proverb translation and other issues, like culture and orature. However, very little has been done on the question of gender-linked translation in African proverbs and the implication of this in their transfer into another language, particularly German. This study aims at examining selected proverbs found in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) with the intent of showing how the use of the word ‘man’ in these proverbs has led to a gender-biased translation of the word in the two German target texts. The conceptual approach used is Sapir-Whorf’s theory of linguistic relativity. It was discovered that the generic word ‘man’ used by the author in the proverbs is replaced in the two target texts in German with the gender-specific word ‘ein Mann’, which makes women less visible as referents.

Maximizing German to English Translation Proficiency: A Bottom-Up Approach Study

In the realm of language education, the adoption of effective teaching methodologies holds paramount importance. This study addresses the discernible gap in the literature concerning the impact of a bottom-up approach on German-to-English translation. By scrutinizing the discrepancy between theories and practices, this research aims to shed light on the transformative potential of this innovative pedagogical approach. Conducted within the German Language Education Study Program at the Faculty of Language and Literature, Makassar State University, this qualitative descriptive research encompasses students enrolled in the Einfuehrung in der Uebersetzungwissenschaft (Introduction to Translation) course during the odd semester of 2020/2021. The study's focal points include assessing students' mastery of translation theory as a foundational element for achieving overarching learning objectives, examining the strategies employed by instructors in implementing the bottom-up approach, developing tailored materials designed to inspire and engage students for optimal learning outcomes, and evaluating students' proficiency in translating German texts into English following the application of the bottom-up approach. Through comprehensive assessments utilizing testing as a primary data collection method, the results unequivocally demonstrate the affirmative impact of the bottom-up approach on the translation proficiency of students in transmuting German texts into English. This study reaffirms the pivotal role of innovative pedagogical approaches in enhancing language learning outcomes and underscores the significance of incorporating the bottom-up approach into German-to-English translation courses.

RUTELA AS A TOOL FOR REVEALING THE POTENTIAL OF UKRAINIAN SCHOOLCHILDREN WHEN STUDYING GERMAN IN AUSTRIA

This article is devoted to the RUTELA project, within the framework of which criteria have been developed that determine the possibilities and potential of a child for the development of German written speech competence. The relevance of this topic is due to the situation, as a result of which more than 10,000 school-age children ended up in Austria and were forced to integrate into the Austrian school system, learn a new foreign language for the majority, and adapt to a new team and teachers. The purpose of this study is to identify the potential of primary schoolchildren with Ukrainian as a native language based on the RUTELA working tool to determine the ability to produce written texts in German. To achieve this goal, a number of tasks were completed: samples of written texts were collected in the classes of an elementary school in the city of Vienna in Ukrainian and German, analysis and interpretation of the data were carried out. The object of the study is the early ability to write in German in elementary school children whose native language is Ukrainian. Identifying the potential of schoolchildren and using it to learn the German language is the subject of the research. Samples of written texts in Ukrainian and German are the material of this study. Elicitation was used as a method, implying actions that encourage the subjects to a productive type of speech activity. The presented study focuses on understanding the development of oral and written literacy in a multilingual environment according to the approach developed by Hans Reich, and also relies on the ELA (Early Literacy Acquisition) working tool, which determines the ability to produce written texts at an early age in Turkish and German. As a result of the analysis of the obtained data, it was possible to establish discrepancies between the realized and actual written competence, as well as to determine the child’s potential for the production of written texts at an early age. The obtained results and their interpretation make it possible to draw up a child’s language profile that describes his abilities, as well as to develop didactic and methodological approaches to support learning both German and his native language.

Event-driven adaptive optical neural network.

We present an adaptive optical neural network based on a large-scale event-driven architecture. In addition to changing the synaptic weights (synaptic plasticity), the optical neural network's structure can also be reconfigured enabling various functionalities (structural plasticity). Key building blocks are wavelength-addressable artificial neurons with embedded phase-change materials that implement nonlinear activation functions and nonvolatile memory. Using multimode focusing, the activation function features both excitatory and inhibitory responses and shows a reversible switching contrast of 3.2 decibels. We train the neural network to distinguish between English and German text samples via an evolutionary algorithm. We investigate both the synaptic and structural plasticity during the training process. On the basis of this concept, we realize a large-scale network consisting of 736 subnetworks with 16 phase-change material neurons each. Overall, 8398 neurons are functional, highlighting the scalability of the photonic architecture.

GERNERMED++: Semantic annotation in German medical NLP through transfer-learning, translation and word alignment

We present a statistical model, GERNERMED++, for German medical natural language processing trained for named entity recognition (NER) as an open, publicly available model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of combining multiple techniques in order to achieve strong results in entity recognition performance by the means of transfer-learning on pre-trained deep language models (LM), word-alignment and neural machine translation, outperforming a pre-existing baseline model on several datasets. Due to the sparse situation of open, public medical entity recognition models for German texts, this work offers benefits to the German research community on medical NLP as a baseline model. The work serves as a refined successor to our first GERNERMED model. Similar to our previous work, our trained model is publicly available to other researchers. The sample code and the statistical model is available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GERNERMED-pp.

Introducing MultilingProfiler: An adaptable tool for analysing the vocabulary in French, German, and Spanish texts

Vocabulary profiling with computational tools and word lists is an established step in the development of pedagogical materials for learners of English. However, existing tools and word lists lack sensitivity to the orthographical, morphological, and grammatical systems of highly-inflected and declined languages. This limits the degree to which lexical profiling can be usefully implemented in the creation of materials intended for use with beginner/low-intermediate learners of such languages who have only partial knowledge of these systems.In this article, we present MultilingProfiler, a vocabulary profiling tool designed to support nuanced profiling of texts in French, German, and Spanish. We introduce the concept of ‘bespoke’ word families tailored to the needs of learners at various stages of development, and outline key features of the tool that operationalise this concept (the functionality to select which inflected, derived, and multiword forms of headwords are included in the profile; sensitivity to orthographical systems; embedded word lists aligning with specific programs of study; and cumulative word lists that grow with learner knowledge). We present two case studies that find MultilingProfiler's features to be effective in highlighting potential mismatches between the lexical demands of texts and the expected knowledge of learners, and consider applications of the tool in research methods.

Отрицание немецких полярных слов и выражений в автоматизированном анализе тональности текста

The aim of the study is to describe various groups of negative words in the German language and the features of their functioning in text tonality analysis in the framework of automated natural language processing (NLP). Scientific analysis focuses on the ability of negative words to modify polar words and expressions, i.e., to change their connotation within an utterance. The study is novel in that it is the first to present in a systematic manner the syntactic-morphological relationship between certain groups of linguistic units of negation and polar words, which must be taken into account in NLP when carrying out sentiment analysis of German texts based on lexico-grammatical rules. As a result, all German language means of negation were divided into groups depending on the extent of their impact on the polar words in the sentence: tonality modification for only the adjoining polar element or the ability to interact with the parts of an utterance that are located at a distance of several tokens. For automatic tonality analysis of German texts, it is necessary to mark the morphological and syntactic features reflecting the peculiarities of both the selected groups of negation words and polar words and expressions at the stage of feature extraction.

Cognitive Levels of Pragmalinguistic Typology and German Text Comprehension

Aim. The research aim is to find out the correlation between the comprehension of read texts in German and the different cognitive linking levels such as the propositional, the epistemic and the speech of act level. Methods. In the first phase of the research, we used qualitative content analysis to identify the different cognitive levels in the texts. After that we used a didactic test to determine the text comprehension in German at the A2 language proficiency level. Results. A statistically significant positive relationship was found between reading comprehension performance in German and the propositional level. This means, higher performance in reading comprehension of German texts is manifested if the read texts contain indicators such as indicative sentences and adverbial tenses. Subsequently, we find a tendency correlation between the comprehension of German texts and the level of speech acts. No statistically significant relationship was found in the variable of epistemic level and German text comprehension. Conclusion. Our research showed that the epistemic level indicators and the speech act level indicators made it difficult for the learners to comprehend German texts, for this reason it would be necessary that after mastering the simpler phenomena such as the indicative mood, they should fluently start to deal with the indicators of the above levels. In the educational process, it is necessary to focus on the training of word types, on explaining the meanings of these words or expressions in order to develop and broaden the vocabulary of learners.

Sentimental analysis & Hate speech detection on English and German text collected from social media platforms using optimal feature extraction and hybrid diagonal gated recurrent neural network

Social networking platforms allow users to ask questions, exchange information, opinions, ideas, and promote companies. Social media's massive user-generated text is useful for study, translation, and analysis. Due of their quick spread and detrimental impact, offensive remarks, hate speech, and harassment must be discovered and deleted immediately. In non-English main language environments, code-mixed text makes hate speech detection difficult. Hate speech's thematic emphasis and target-oriented orientation are typically ignored in binary categorization methods. These methods also fail in code-mixing multilingual contexts. In this study, we propose an optimal feature extraction and hybrid diagonal gated recurrent neural network (FE-DGRNN) for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis on code-mixed texts in multiple languages. Our FE-DGRNN technique consists of three processes: preprocessing, improved seagull optimization (ISO) for feature extraction, and hybrid diagonal gated recurrent neural network (Hyb-DGRNN) for hate speech detection and sentiment analysis. We evaluate the performance of our proposed technique using the HASOC 2019 dataset, focusing on English and German. The results demonstrate high accuracy of 95%, 96%, and 92% for English tasks, with Precision and F-measure of 94%, 96%, and 91%. For German tasks, the accuracy is 92% and 93%, with Precision and F-measure of 90% and 91%.

DE-Lemma: A Maximum-Entropy Based Lemmatizer for German Medical Text.

When processing written German language, it is helpful, to use the base form (or: lemma) of possibly inflected words, such as verbs, nouns or named entities. However, for German text from the (bio)medical domain, e.g., discharge letters, or entries stored in electronic medical or health records (EMR, EHR), difficulties exist in finding the correct lemma, as, for instance, the medical language has roots in Latin or Greek. In such cases, stemming techniques might provide inaccurate results for text written in German. This study demonstrates a Machine Learning approach for training Apache OpenNLP-based lemmatizer models from publicly available German treebanks. The resulting four "DE-Lemma" models were evaluated against a sample of (bio)medical nouns, randomly selected from real-world discharge letters. The most promising DE-Lemma model achieved an accuracy of 88.0% (F1 = .936).

Goethe als Sprachhistoriker

The famous verses from Goethe’s ‚Faust I‘ Mein schönes Fräulein, darf ich wagen, / Meinen Arm und Geleit Ihr anzutragen? and Margarethe’s answer Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön, / Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehn. repeatedly provoke discussion about why Margarethe emphasizes that she is not a Fräulein. It is also clear from other passages in the text, especially in the use of personal names, that Goethe likes to cite historical usage of language. We know that Goethe read early New High German texts, so we can assume that Goethe was concerned with earlier language use. Language history, especially word history, thus becomes an important tool for adequately understanding Goethe’s texts.

Hör-Sehen Strategy to Improve Text Understanding in Learning German for Beginners

Abstract. This study investigates the use of the Hör-Sehen strategy in improving students' ability to understand texts in the Receptive course of the German language. This strategy combines what is heard and what is seen (e.g. an audio-visual technique), making it easier for students to understand the content of the text. This research used a mixed methods research design, combining descriptive quantitative and qualitative methods of a Concurrent embedded research model. The data collection techniques used in this study consisted of observation, pre-test implementation, experiment implementation, post-test implementation, questionnaire distribution, and student response questionnaire. Respondents in this study amounted to 30 students of the German language education study program who were at the beginner level. The results show that applying the Hör-Sehen strategy has a statistically significant positive influence on the ability to understand German texts in beginning learners in the Receptive course. The results of the interviews and questionnaires show that using this strategy can focus students' thinking and make them interested and motivated to take part in the learning process. The other results show that the students understand the information contained in the texts, can offer an interpretation, and provide reflection and assessment of a text through exercises and assignments, which are structured according to the steps in this strategy and form an initial understanding of difficult vocabulary in the textKeywords: Language Ability, Text Understanding, Beginning Language Learners, German, Hör-Sehen Strategy