15-17 Ocak 2025 tarihlerinde, İspanya’nın önemli kültürel merkezlerinden Valensiya’da, Almanca yazan kadın yazarların Hispanik dünyaya bakışlarını edebiyat, kültür, kimlik ve tarih temaları üzerinden tartışmayı amaçlayan uluslararası bir kongre gerçekleştirildi. Kongre, Valensiya Üniversitesi Filoloji, Çeviri ve İletişim Fakültesi’ne bağlı Alman Filolojisi Bölümü’nün yürüttüğü CIAICO 2022/105 araştırma projesi çerçevesinde, “Die hispanische Welt neu denken? Perspektiven deutschsprachiger Schriftstellerinnen” başlığıyla düzenlendi. Organizasyonu RIALE Araştırma Grubu üstlendi. Etkinlikte Almanca yazan kadın yazarların eserlerinde Hispanik dünyanın nasıl temsil edildiği ele alındı. Özellikle odepórica, yani seyahat anlatıları temelinde yürütülen tartışmalar; stereotiplerin inşası, erkek bakışının etkisi ve kadın gezginlerin Avrupa kültürel imgelemindeki yeri gibi konulara odaklandı; kültür aktarımı, estetik deneyimler, göç hikâyeleri ve seyahat yazınında kadınların temsili gibi konular etrafında derinlik kazandı. Bu doğrultuda kadın bakış açısının tarihsel ve kültürel bağlamlardaki yansımalarına odaklanıldı. Nitekim kongre, Hispanik ve Alman kültür dünyaları arasındaki ilişkileri başta yenilikçi bir toplumsal cinsiyet perspektifi olmak üzere farklı tarihsel, kültürel ve metodolojik bağlamlar ışığında yeniden yorumlamayı amaçlıyordu. Disiplinlerarası bir çerçevede ilerleyen kongre Alman ve İspanyol edebiyatı çalışmaları, tarih ve toplumsal cinsiyet araştırmaları gibi farklı alanlardan akademisyenleri bir araya getirerek entelektüel etkileşim için zengin bir ortam sundu. Böylece kongre, Alman edebiyatı ile Hispanik dünya arasındaki çok katmanlı ilişkileri tarihsel, kültürel ve edebî bağlamlarda değerlendiren verimli bir akademik platform oluşturdu.
German literature, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
The question if there is a category of modal particles in French has not yet received an unequivocal answer, and those who acknowledge the existence of modal particles in French do not agree on the extension of the category. In the present contribution, these questions are addressed from the point of view of German linguistics as practiced in the German-speaking countries. It is shown that French and German are actually rather similar in this regard and that the different analyses are mainly due to differences in perspective, the Romance tradition being in general more reluctant to classify elements as modal particles than the Germanic tradition. Given the similarities in the use of modal particles in the two languages, the paper pleads for a homogenization of perspectives, applying the criteria with the same consistency, in order to facilitate comparative research and language teaching.
Miriam Anschütz, Thanh Mai Pham, Eslam Nasrallah
et al.
The ability to paraphrase texts across different complexity levels is essential for creating accessible texts that can be tailored toward diverse reader groups. Thus, we introduce German4All, the first large-scale German dataset of aligned readability-controlled, paragraph-level paraphrases. It spans five readability levels and comprises over 25,000 samples. The dataset is automatically synthesized using GPT-4 and rigorously evaluated through both human and LLM-based judgments. Using German4All, we train an open-source, readability-controlled paraphrasing model that achieves state-of-the-art performance in German text simplification, enabling more nuanced and reader-specific adaptations. We opensource both the dataset and the model to encourage further research on multi-level paraphrasing
A Paisagem Linguística, área de pesquisa relativamente recente, trata da forma escrita das línguas visível no espaço público. A metodologia de coleta de dados engloba fotografar e documentar os diferentes tipos de suporte, de línguas e suas funções no espaço urbano. As pesquisas em Paisagem Linguística geralmente consideram a presença simultânea de várias línguas ou variedades e sua relação umas com as outras, porém, dentro da abordagem denominada Spot German, não necessariamente utilizada com fins acadêmicos, a coleta de dados pode ser realizada com um objetivo específico, sem documentação de todos os sinais visíveis. Assim, neste artigo, discorro sobre as características, definições e diferenças entre as abordagens e apresento brevemente as possíveis fontes de coleta de dados com base em pesquisas realizadas em diversos países. Além disso, trago como exemplo de aplicação a língua alemã em sua relação com o espaço próximo a um colégio alemão e sua possível influência na paisagem linguística da cidade na qual se encontra. Por fim, apresento possibilidades pedagógicas para explorar a paisagem linguística no ensino de línguas, que oferece oportunidade de investigar a relação da cidade e das pessoas com as línguas do entorno, da mesma forma que apresenta inúmeras entradas para exploração didática.
German literature, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
Umutcan Serles, Elias Kärle, Richard Hunkel
et al.
Tourism is one of the most critical sectors of the global economy. Due to its heterogeneous and fragmented nature, it provides one of the most suitable use cases for knowledge graphs. In this poster, we introduce the German Tourism Knowledge Graph that integrates tourism-related data from 16 federal states of Germany and various other sources to provide a curated knowledge source for various applications. It is publicly available through GUIs and an API.
Gender-fair language, an evolving German linguistic variation, fosters inclusion by addressing all genders or using neutral forms. Nevertheless, there is a significant lack of resources to assess the impact of this linguistic shift on classification using language models (LMs), which are probably not trained on such variations. To address this gap, we present Lou, the first dataset featuring high-quality reformulations for German text classification covering seven tasks, like stance detection and toxicity classification. Evaluating 16 mono- and multi-lingual LMs on Lou shows that gender-fair language substantially impacts predictions by flipping labels, reducing certainty, and altering attention patterns. However, existing evaluations remain valid, as LM rankings of original and reformulated instances do not significantly differ. While we offer initial insights on the effect on German text classification, the findings likely apply to other languages, as consistent patterns were observed in multi-lingual and English LMs.
This article is devoted to the consideration of the titles of modern German-language novels after 1989, expressed by a substantive phrase, from the standpoint of structural analysis. The purpose of the study is to identify lexical-pragmatic potential of the most frequent models of titles. The phrase in the process of speech is not reproduced in its entirety, but is constructed by the speaker in the process of speech. This allows us to treat the phrase as a free lexical unit. The relationship between the components of a phrase is characterized by greater freedom than the relationship between the components of a compound word. This freedom is expressed in the possibility of replacing each full-valued word as part of a phrase with another word of the same class without losing the grammatical essence of the phrase. However, such grammatical unlimited compatibility is opposed to the limitations in lexical compatibility of words. In this regard, phrases differ from phraseologisms, which are characterized by lexical and grammatical idiomatic. The semantic integrity of the phrase is manifested in the semantic gravitation of the components towards each other. The presence in the phrase of the organizing core and its subordinate component confirms the thesis about the structural closure of the phrase. The relevance of this study is due to the special status of the phrase in the grammar of the German language and the rich pragmatic potential for creating successful communication between the author and the reader of novel literature. The results of the study revealed the characteristic features of the titles of the above type and identified a group of titles with greater intertextuality for further study.
Digital health applications are digital medical products (e.g. apps, web applications) that are prescribed to insured persons by physicians or psychotherapists and reimbursed by health insurances. For manufacturers, fulfilling the regulatory requirements for approval of a digital health application is challenging. This can be seen in the number of pulled and rejected applications from manufacturers for listing in the register of digital health applications. As of May 2022, a total of 61 applications have been pulled back by manufacturers and 8 have received negative decisions from the German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices. Manufacturers want support to fulfill the requirements for approval of a digital health application. Based on a literature review and a sighting of relevant regulations, a roadmap was developed to represent the approval process for a digital health application to manufacturers in a visual and simplified flowchart. The roadmap consists for example the submission of the application, the verification of the application and listing of the digital health application in the register. The roadmap simplifies the approval process of a digital health application, enables early identification of requirements, and helps determine the right strategy. A field trial is essential to confirm its effectiveness and improvements are needed based on feedback. The roadmap is being tested with startups and small businesses to evaluate its applicability in different contexts.
Olga Yu. Antsyferova, Andrey A. Astvatsaturov, Irina V. Morozova
et al.
On December 8, 2022, an international academic conference dedicated to the year 1922 as an important milestone in the history of American and European Modernism was held at the Russian State University of Humanities (Moscow). The conference aimed at the cultural reconstruction of 1922 and was organized by the Department of Comparative-Historical Literary Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, and A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. American literary history occupied a prominent place in the program of the conference. The plenary session was devoted to T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Olga Polovinkina (Russian State University for the Humanities, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke about the importance of the aesthetics of the music hall for the strcture The Waste Land. Igor Shaitanov (Russian State University of Humanities, The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) drew a parallel between The Waste Land and Evegny Zamyatin's Alatyr’. Vassily Tolmatchoff (Lomonosov Moscow State University) suggested a new interpretation of the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. A.A. Astvatsaturov (St. Petersburg State University) considered T.S. Eliot’s modernist work in comparison with the creative attitudes and self-fashioning of Henry Miller. Alexandra Zinovieva (Lomonosov Moscow State University) spoke about Countess Marie Louise Elisabeth Larisсh von Moennich, the heroine of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and her participation in German and Austrian cinematographic projects of the late 1910s — early 1920s. Olga Panova (A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov Moscow State University) reconstructed the year 1922 in the history of the Harlem Renaissance. Irina Morozova (Russian State University of Humanities) presented the year 1922 as an important period in the history of American pharaohmania. Olga Antsyferova (St. Petersburg State University) analysed the book 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté; Cambridge University Press, 2015) showing how the methodology of historical simultaneity works on the material of culture studies.
Peter Stamm writes his works as a close observer of the individual by focusing on the individual’s inner world, behavior patterns, and relationships and by bringing more inner journeys to the fore. The author handles in great detail the thoughts, feelings, and reactions of the individual based on what they experience in their inner world. Therefore, his works have an aspect that is open to psychological questions, and this may also be due to the psychology and psychopathology training the author has received. Stamm chooses individuals who generally believe in a psychological sense that they are at the end of their lives, looking for ways out, wanting to make new beginnings, and totally surrendering or turning inward as his protagonists and uses these characters to actually causes his readers to look for psychological answers. Of course, these answers materialize through the choices the characters in this fictional world make, and the effects from those choices ripple throughout the novel, both within themselves as well as through those around them. The author creates representatives who try to resist the chaos created by the modern world or who symbolize an inbetweenness through their figures who are lost in this chaos. A representative example of this occurs in the novel To the Back of Beyond and thus will be discussed and evaluated here from Freud’s psychodynamic point of view, witnessing an inner journey by concentrating on the inner world. Stamm creates a psychological world in his novel and equips a main figure there, shaping this figure within the framework of his relationship with the people around him and his family. According to Freud’s psychodynamic approach, the character’s desires for liberation and to detach himself from his own life and struggle for years away from his family lead to a process that begins with the dominance of desires and impulses over the individual. From a psychodynamic point of view, the study focuses on how the unconscious field that directs the individual in this novel affects life and the paths on which it leads. The main figure suddenly decides to leave his home and family, and his endless wanderings in the mountains, plains, and forests turn into an inner journey in which the figure tries to find himself. This journey is naturally quite strikingly revealed through the detailed descriptions the author makes, and the figure is dragged from one place to another in this mysterious journey along with all his inner turmoil. From Freud’s psychodynamic point of view, this drift is embodied by figure’s instinctive movements and experiences in his inner world.
German literature, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
Mariam Bangura, Kristina Barabashova, Anna Karnysheva
et al.
This study is devoted to the automatic generation of German drama texts. We suggest an approach consisting of two key steps: fine-tuning a GPT-2 model (the outline model) to generate outlines of scenes based on keywords and fine-tuning a second model (the generation model) to generate scenes from the scene outline. The input for the neural model comprises two datasets: the German Drama Corpus (GerDraCor) and German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv or DTA). In order to estimate the effectiveness of the proposed method, our models are compared with baseline GPT-2 models. Our models perform well according to automatic quantitative evaluation, but, conversely, manual qualitative analysis reveals a poor quality of generated texts. This may be due to the quality of the dataset or training inputs.
Gianluca Nogara, Francesco Pierri, Stefano Cresci
et al.
Proprietary public APIs play a crucial and growing role as research tools among social scientists. Among such APIs, Google's machine learning-based Perspective API is extensively utilized for assessing the toxicity of social media messages, providing both an important resource for researchers and automatic content moderation. However, this paper exposes an important bias in Perspective API concerning German language text. Through an in-depth examination of several datasets, we uncover intrinsic language biases within the multilingual model of Perspective API. We find that the toxicity assessment of German content produces significantly higher toxicity levels than other languages. This finding is robust across various translations, topics, and data sources, and has significant consequences for both research and moderation strategies that rely on Perspective API. For instance, we show that, on average, four times more tweets and users would be moderated when using the German language compared to their English translation. Our findings point to broader risks associated with the widespread use of proprietary APIs within the computational social sciences.
In this paper we analyze features to classify human- and AI-generated text for English, French, German and Spanish and compare them across languages. We investigate two scenarios: (1) The detection of text generated by AI from scratch, and (2) the detection of text rephrased by AI. For training and testing the classifiers in this multilingual setting, we created a new text corpus covering 10 topics for each language. For the detection of AI-generated text, the combination of all proposed features performs best, indicating that our features are portable to other related languages: The F1-scores are close with 99% for Spanish, 98% for English, 97% for German and 95% for French. For the detection of AI-rephrased text, the systems with all features outperform systems with other features in many cases, but using only document features performs best for German (72%) and Spanish (86%) and only text vector features leads to best results for English (78%).
As conventional flexibility providers are gradually being replaced by variable renewable energies and electricity demand keeps rising, additional flexibility will become increasingly valuable for the power system. Meanwhile, new sources of flexibility known as distributed energy resources are starting to emerge. Among them electric vehicles have a promising potential to provide short-term frequency-control services. However their integration into balancing markets faces various barriers. Based on the existing literature, this paper aims at identifying which potential barriers exist in the case of the participation of electric vehicles in German balancing markets.
Keno K. Bressem, Jens-Michalis Papaioannou, Paul Grundmann
et al.
This paper presents medBERTde, a pre-trained German BERT model specifically designed for the German medical domain. The model has been trained on a large corpus of 4.7 Million German medical documents and has been shown to achieve new state-of-the-art performance on eight different medical benchmarks covering a wide range of disciplines and medical document types. In addition to evaluating the overall performance of the model, this paper also conducts a more in-depth analysis of its capabilities. We investigate the impact of data deduplication on the model's performance, as well as the potential benefits of using more efficient tokenization methods. Our results indicate that domain-specific models such as medBERTde are particularly useful for longer texts, and that deduplication of training data does not necessarily lead to improved performance. Furthermore, we found that efficient tokenization plays only a minor role in improving model performance, and attribute most of the improved performance to the large amount of training data. To encourage further research, the pre-trained model weights and new benchmarks based on radiological data are made publicly available for use by the scientific community.
The paper refers to the emotional level in online communication, which appears in a special way through colorful emojis in social media. The functions of these pictorial symbols enable people to express their emotions and feelings. It is related to the fact that face-to-face situations are less and less common in digital communication. Moreover, their use leads to the multimodality of the numerous digital contributions, which makes them particularly enriching, colorful and complementary. Research on emojis is becoming significant in linguistics over time, so they form a broad field for the development and discovery of new phenomena. The aim of this paper is to consider what emotions can be conveyed with the help of emojis and whether these pictorial signs can create a new form of communication. For this reason, their influence on digital communication is examined by analyzing selected tweets about Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk on the basis of three main criteria (form, content and emotions of emojis). Conclusions bring to light the finding that emojis, despite their ambiguity, can convey positive as well as neutral and negative emotions. The new form of communication arouses interest among Internet users, which can lead to next unknown ways of using them. Emojis are an area that has not yet been thoroughly researched, so their study by linguists is noteworthy.
Traditionally, Text Simplification is treated as a monolingual translation task where sentences between source texts and their simplified counterparts are aligned for training. However, especially for longer input documents, summarizing the text (or dropping less relevant content altogether) plays an important role in the simplification process, which is currently not reflected in existing datasets. Simultaneously, resources for non-English languages are scarce in general and prohibitive for training new solutions. To tackle this problem, we pose core requirements for a system that can jointly summarize and simplify long source documents. We further describe the creation of a new dataset for joint Text Simplification and Summarization based on German Wikipedia and the German children's lexicon "Klexikon", consisting of almost 2900 documents. We release a document-aligned version that particularly highlights the summarization aspect, and provide statistical evidence that this resource is well suited to simplification as well. Code and data are available on Github: https://github.com/dennlinger/klexikon
Extracting metadata from scientific papers can be considered a solved problem in NLP due to the high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods. However, this does not apply to German scientific publications, which have a variety of styles and layouts. In contrast to most of the English scientific publications that follow standard and simple layouts, the order, content, position and size of metadata in German publications vary greatly among publications. This variety makes traditional NLP methods fail to accurately extract metadata from these publications. In this paper, we present a method that extracts metadata from PDF documents with different layouts and styles by viewing the document as an image. We used Mask R-CNN that is trained on COCO dataset and finetuned with PubLayNet dataset that consists of ~200K PDF snapshots with five basic classes (e.g. text, figure, etc). We refine-tuned the model on our proposed synthetic dataset consisting of ~30K article snapshots to extract nine patterns (i.e. author, title, etc). Our synthetic dataset is generated using contents in both languages German and English and a finite set of challenging templates obtained from German publications. Our method achieved an average accuracy of around $90\%$ which validates its capability to accurately extract metadata from a variety of PDF documents with challenging templates.
In recent years, with the events of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and the transformation of the German Alternative for Germany (AfD) into an anti-migration party, the issue of migration has developed into a highly salient topic. That was not always the case. This novel analysis conducts a large comparative study of the influence of the AfD in the German federal states’ parliaments in the policy field of migration from 2011 to 2018 by using Wordscores to measure party positions from parliamentary debates. It contributes to a broader literature by connecting to both the methodological research on measuring party positions from texts and the research on the influence of radical right parties (RRPs) on party competition in the policy field of migration. The results of the analysis show that in most of the federal states, the entry of the AfD is followed by polarisation of party competition. In many cases a greater convergence of the position of the mainstream parties with the AfD can be observed. In all cases, the AfD positions itself apart from the mainstream parties and significantly extends the political dimension in which the parties compete with each other.