Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, February 7, 16:15, Building 17, Seminar Room

Information `portioning' in a Cross-linguistic Perspective (German - English - Norwegian)

What happens if the the information contained in a complex, dense sentence is distributed over two sentences in the process of translation in a given context, and how does it happen?

How do typological and structural differences between languages (e.g., left or right headedness of VPs and NPs) influence the level of textual encoding?

These are linguistic questions of great practical relevance, which are being addressed by the Norwegian research project Languages in Contrast. This talk will focus on addressing the first question based on a discourse representation theoretic background, using authentic text samples.

References

Doherty, Monika (ed.), Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung (studia grammatica 47), Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

Stig Johansson and Signe Oksefjell (eds.), Corpora and Crosslinguistic Research: Theory, Method, and Case Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

This talk can be given in German, if requested by the audience. If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Geert-Jan Kruijff.