Specifically, we invite scholars, researchers and scientists to collaboratively work on a heterogeneous, German-language corpus that has been annotated with entity references (see below). The corpus comprises the following texts:
- One speech from four different debates from the German national parliament (Bundestag): S. Leutheuser-Schnarrenberger on Oct. 28, 1999; A. Merkel on Dec. 16, 2004; A. Ulrich on Nov. 15, 2007 and A. Karl on March 17, 2011
- Letters from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) from May 4th to June 16
- The segment titled Zur Theorie des Kunstwerks from Adornos Ästhetische Theorie
- books 3 to 6 of Wolfram’s von Eschenbach Parzival
Each text (and genre) has its own characteristics. Nevertheless, all annotators followed the same uniform annotation guidelines which will also be released and discussed.
We invite contributions to one of the following tasks:
- Automatic entity reference detection: Experiments on automatically predicting annotations on unseen texts, using rule-based or statistical systems
- Visualising entity references in text: Visualisation options for the (interactive) exploration of the existing or new entity reference annotations
- Annotation Analysis: Qualitative or quantitative analysis of the existing annotations or annotation guidelines, or annotation experiments on the applicability of the guidelines to new texts
- Freestyle: Anything goes
Contributions to task 1 will be evaluated quantitatively and competitively (shared task). Contributions to tasks 2 to 4 will be evaluated qualitatively by the organisation committee (unshared task).
The corpus and the annotation scheme have been selected with a number of research questions in mind originating from different fields of humanities and social sciences. The submissions are invited to take these questions into account (or get inspired by them), although it is not a submission requirement to pertain to one of these questions.
- Entity networks
- How connected and dense are networks based on person mentions?
- Are central persons, protagonists identifiable?
- Are abstract concepts defined, or are they introduced (and used) in certain constellations, as Adorno claims to do?
- How to compare entity mention structures or networks across different texts (that might be written in different languages)?
- How different are the character relations in the German Parzival and its French original or other Arthurian romances?
- Can we identify the Werther-triangle (Werther, Lotte, Albert) in Werther-adaptations, even if the names might be different?
- Are entities mentioned in re-occurring contexts or context categories?
- How relevant are national, trans- or international organisations in the context of parliamentary debates on certain policy areas?
- Do character mentions (always/often/never) appear in a given thematic context?
- Are there interactions between entities, within the same or across different types?
- Which political parties tend to refer to which organisations in political debates?
- Do some characters (only/always) appear at certain locations?
- Can we observe changes related to some of the above aspects over time?
- Are some (political) organisations more present in parliamentary discourse before and after, e.g., the German reunification?
- How does the context of character mentions change over the course of a single text?