CRC 1287 Collaborative Research Centre 1287 Limits of Variability in Language: Cognitive, Computational, and Grammatical Aspects

Project T01

in Phase 2

Transforming text across media

PI(s): Prof. Dr. Manfred Stede & Prof. Dr. Tatjana Scheffler

In collaboration with two language-technology companies, the project addresses the task of tailoring text to the conventions and requirements of different target media, in particular written blogs and microblogs (Twitter), and spoken podcasts. The focus is on the discourse-level phenomena of coreference, particle use, and coherence relations. Variation on these dimensions will be correlated with human processing ease in reading/listening experiments. The findings will then be translated into models and algorithms for identifying text passages that should be adapted, and experiments with automatically performing such adaptations will be carried out.

Papers

Author(s)TitleYearPublished inLinks
Scheffler, T., Kern, L.-A., & Seemann, H. J.The medium is not the message: Individual level register variation in blogs vs. tweets.2022Register Studies, 4(2), 171-201.
Seemann, H. J., & Scheffler, T.Differentiating Social Media Texts via Clustering.2022In F. Karsdorp, A. Lassche, & K. Nielbo (Eds.), Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2022 (pp. 177-188). Antwerp, Belgium.
Shahmohammadi, S., Seemann, H. J., Stede, M., & Scheffler, T.Encoding discourse structure: comparison of RST and QUD.2023In M. Strube, C. Braud, C. Hardmeier, J. J. Li, S. Loáiciga, & A. Zeldes (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023), (pp. 89–98), Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics. *
Shahmohammadi, S., & Stede, M.Discourse Parsing for German with new RST Corpora.2024Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2024), pp. 65-74. Vienna, Austria: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Seemann, H. J., Shahmohammadi, S., Stede, M., & Scheffler, T.Spoken vs. Written Computer-Mediated Communiation.2024Proceedings of the 11th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC 2024), pp. 70-74. Université Côte d'Azur, Nice, France.
Seemann, H. J., Shahmohammadi, S., Stede, M., & Scheffler, T.Discourse-Level Features in Spoken and Written Communication.2024Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2024), pp. 292–302. Vienna, Austria: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Seemann, H.Modalpartikel2024In D. Gutzmann, K. Turgay, & T. E. Zimmermann (Eds.), Semantik und Pragmatik. Wörterbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Seemann, H., & Scheffler, T.German Modal Particles as Discourse Signals.2025Dialogue & Discourse, 16(1), 1-30.
Scheffler, T., & Seemann, H.Review: Remus Gergel, Ingo Reich & Augustin Speyer (eds.)(2022): Particles in German, English, and Beyond. Amsterdam/Phil- adelphia: John Benjamins.2025Linguistische Berichte, 281, 111-118.
Scheffler, T.Social media corpora for analyzing linguistic variation.2025In L. Cotgrove, L. Herzberg, & H. Lüngen (Eds.), Exploring digitally-mediated communication with corpora: Methods, analyses, and corpus construction (pp. 329-348). De Gruyter.
Hewett, F., & Stede, M.Disagreements in analyses of rhetorical text structure: A new dataset and first analyses.2025In S. Peng & I. Rehbein (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XIX-2025) (pp. 35–47). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Talks

Author(s)TitleYearPublished inLinks
Scheffler, T., Kern, L.-A., & Seemann, H. J.Modal particles as markers of style, medium, and register.2022Paper presented at the Workshop: Metaphors and stance markers in register variation (MeStaR), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. 16 June.
Stede, M.Computational Framing: Many Approaches - One Task?2023Invited talk at the NLP Group, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Dept. of Computer Science. Hannover, Germany. 18 May.
Scheffler, T.Individual linguistic variability in social media.2023Invited talk at the CMC 2023: CMC-CORPORA 2023, University of Mannheim, Mannhein, Germany. 14 September.
Seemann, H. J., Shahmohammadi, S., Scheffler, T., & Stede, M.Building a Parallel Discourse-Annotated Multimedia Corpus.2023Poster presented at the CMC 2023: CMC-CORPORA 2023, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany. 14-15 September.
Seemann, H. J., & Maršík, A.Expressing the degree of confidence and attitude in Czech and German.2023Poster presented at the 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10), University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany. 18-21 July.
Seemann, H. J.Modal Particles as Markers in Discourse.2024Paper presented at the Conference on Discourse Markers: Markers in Discourse and Markers on Discourse. Metz, France. 21 - 22 June.
Contact
University of Potsdam
Department Linguistics
Prof. Dr. Doreen Georgi
Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25
House 14, Room 3.33
14476 Potsdam

(+49) 331 977-2968
doreen.georgi@uni-potsdam.de
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