Nils Reiter

• Dr. phil.
• Professor at University of Cologne

This chapter discusses the central CRETA workflow. Starting with a research question from the humanities and/or social sciences, we define work packages and partial questions. On the basis of these questions the central terms are operationalized via annotations and automations - such as machine learning. The application of these labeling rules to t...

The Center for Reflected Text Analytics (CRETA) develops interdisciplinary mixed methods for text analytics in the research fields of the digital humanities. This volume is a collection of text analyses from specialty fields including literary studies, linguistics, the social sciences, and philosophy. It thus offers an overview of the methodology o...

Dramatic texts are a highly structured literary text type. Their quantitative analysis so far has relied on analysing structural properties (e.g., in the form of networks). Resolving coreferences is crucial for an analysis of the content of the character speech, but developing automatic coreference resolution (CR) systems depends on the existence o...

Coreference resolution is the task of grouping together references to the same discourse entity. Resolving coreference in literary texts could benefit a number of Digital Humanities (DH) tasks, such as analyzing the depiction of characters and/or their relations. Domain-dependent training data has shown to improve coreference resolution for many do...

Problem gambling is a major public health concern and is associated with profound psychological distress and economic problems. There are numerous gambling communities on the internet where users exchange information about games, gambling tactics, as well as gambling-related problems. Individuals exhibiting higher levels of problem gambling engage...

The digital transformation is accompanied by two simultaneous processes: digital humanities challenging the humanities, their theories, methodologies and disciplinary identities, and pushing computer science to get involved in new fields. But how can qualitative and quantitative methods be usefully combined in one research project? What are the the...

Zusammenfassung This article systematically explores different methods to describe and compare the thematic content of character speech in drama. The problems here are two-fold: The determination of the theme of a text segment is challenging, as it might be subtle or deliberately hidden. Secondly, the evaluation of this determination is difficult,...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to prevent its spread have had a negative impact on substance use behaviour. It is likely that social distancing and lockdown measures have also altered gambling behaviour, for instance shifting from land-based to online gambling. We used large-scale web scraping to analyse posting behaviour on a major German...

Over the last years, the Digital Humanities (DH) have provided innovative possibilities to pose new and different questions to large text corpuses. The question whether ‚aesthetics‘ can be ‚quantified‘ indicates that a systematic annotation of aesthetic phenomena must be based on close reading, but may well go beyond the simple markup of lexical el...

This article puts operationalization as a research practice and its theoretical consequences into focus. As all sciences as well as humanities areas use concepts to describe their realm of investigation, digital humanities projects are usually faced with the challenge of ‘bridging the gap’ from theoretical concepts (whose meaning(s) depend on a cer...

This chapter investigates the relationship between interpretative literary character types, such as the schemer, and descriptive character properties, such as gender, age, and social status. This relationship is crucial to studying dramatic characters quantitatively across a corpus of plays, as both properties and types can be used to guide a ratio...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to prevent its spread have had a negative impact on substance use behaviour and posed a special threat for individuals at risk. Problem gambling is a major public health concern, and it is likely that the lockdown and social distancing measures have altered gambling behaviour, for instance shifting from land-b...

Shared tasks are a work format prevalent in the natural language processing and machine learning community. This special issue continues the reporting on the shared task SANTA (Systematic Analysis of Narrative levels Through Annotation), which has the development of annotation guidelines for narrative levels as its goal. Narrative levels, also know...

The present article discusses and reflects on possible ways of operationalizing the terminology of traditional literary studies for use in computational literary studies. By »operationalization«, we mean the development of a method for tracing a (theoretical) term back to text-surface phenomena; this is done explicitly and in a rule-based manner, i...

El desarrollo de métodos computacionales cuantitativos para llevar a cabo un análisis estructural y formal de textos dramáticos es relativamente reciente en las Humanidades Digitales. En este artículo estudiaremos, a través de este enfoque cuantitativo, algunos aspectos de la obra de Calderón de la Barca. Para llevar a cabo el análisis se hará refe...

Reading notes in books and other printed matter are of increasing interest in Philology and Cultural History. However, we still lack an understanding of their epistemic foundations. With reference to Thomas Mann’s private library, I suggest viewing the act of annotating with pens itself as an epistemic practice. For this, I introduce the term ‘pen...

The article describes the idea, operationalization decisions and results of the first shared task in the Digital Humanities. In the task, different participating teams developed annotation guidelines for narrative levels independently. Annotation guidelines are a prerequisite for the development of systems for the automatic detection of textual phe...

This chapter gives a brief practical introduction into the development of annotation guidelines, for the scenario that new guidelines are created for a phenomenon or concept that has been described theoretically. In a single sentence, the goal of annotation guidelines can be formulated as: Given a theoretically described phenomenon or concept, desc...

This contribution is devoted to the question of the extent to which selected texts by Theodor W. Adorno actually realize the concept of a constellative use of terms propagated by him by comparing the links between concepts in Adorno’s texts with those in selected texts by Rudolf Carnap. In order to carry out this comparison, a model of conceptualit...

This chapter presents various activities related to internal and external communication, including activities related to the dissemination of ideas developed in CRETA. Specifically, we present the ‘hackatorial’ (workshop “Learning machine learning”), a ‘workshop on operationalization’ as a core task for the digital humanities, and the ‘CRETA coachi...

In computational linguistics (CL), annotation is used with the goal of compiling data as the basis for machine learning approaches and automation. At the same time, in the Humanities scholars use annotation in the form of notetaking while reading texts. We claim that with the development of Digital Humanities (DH), annotation has become a method th...

This chapter presents the basic considerations, the evaluation scheme and the results of the first shared task in and for digital humanities. The shared task aims to create annotation guidelines for narrative levels and has been able to attract eight participating teams in 2018. The evaluation scheme combines the dimensions ‘conceptual coverage’, ‘...

Der Workshop adressiert eine der großen Herausforderungen für Arbeiten in den Digital Humanities – die Operationalisierung geisteswissenschaftlicher Konzepte und Fragestellungen für computergestützte Methoden. Anhand dreier Anwendungsfälle zeigen wir auf, welche Herausforderungen sich aus dem Einsatz computergestützter Methoden für geisteswissensch...

In this paper, we aim at identifying protagonists in plays automatically. To this end, we train a classifier using various features and investigate the importance of each feature. A challenging aspect here is that the number of spoken words for a character is a very strong baseline. We can show, however, that a) the stage presence of characters and...

In computational linguistics (CL), annotation is used with the goal of compiling data as the basis for machine learning approaches and automation. At the same time, in the Humanities scholars use annotation in the form of note-taking while reading texts. We claim that with the development of Digital Humanities (DH), annotation has become a method t...

The structure of the Digital Humanities master's program at University of Stuttgart is characterized by a big proportion of classes related to natural language processing. In this paper, we discuss the motivation for this design and associated challenges students and teachers are faced with. To provide background information, we also sum up our und...

This is the publication of an shared/unshared task workshop (developed in CRETA: Center for Reflected Text Analytics), which was held during DHd 2017, Bern, Switzerland. While shared tasks are used as a direct benchmark for different systems/approaches/methods on a clearly defined and evaluated task, unshared tasks are open to various kinds of cont...

Das Ziel dieses Tutorials ist es, den Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern konkrete und praktische Einblicke in einen Standardfall automatischer Textanalyse zu geben. Am Beispiel der automatischen Erkennung von Entitätenreferenzen gehen wir auf allgemeine Annahmen, Verfahrensweisen und methodische Standards bei maschinellen Lernverfahren ein. Die Teilne...

The influence of Shakespeare on the playwrights of Sturm und Drang is one of the most investigated areas of German drama history and its influences. However, the application of methods from computational and corpus linguistics for text content and the quantitative analysis of text structure shed a new light on this influence. In particular, we focu...

Das Ziel dieses Tutorials ist es, den Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern konkrete und praktische Einblicke in einen Standardfall automatischer Textanalyse zu geben. Am Beispiel der automatischen Erkennung von Entitätenreferenzen gehen wir auf allgemeine Annahmen, Verfahrensweisen und methodische Standards bei maschinellen Lernverfahren ein. Die Teilne...

Der Artikel bilanziert die bisherige qualitative germanistisch-mediävistische Prologforschung – ausgewertet werden 48 Forschungsbeiträge, die zwischen 1955 und 2009 erschienen sind – hinsichtlich ihres Vorgehens und ihrer Ergebnisse. Dabei kommt er zu dem Ergebnis, dass die hermeneutische Forschung, die einzelne Stellen bzw. Prologe in den Blick ni...

We discuss and evaluate a new annotation scheme and discourse-analytic method, the QUD-tree framework. We present an annotation study, in which the framework, based on the concept of Questions under Discussion, is applied to English and German interview data, using TreeAnno, an annotation tool specially developed for this new kind of discourse anno...

Mit dem Tagger möchten wir nicht nur eine „Marktlücke“ schließen (denn bisher gibt es keinen frei verwendbaren PoS-Tagger für das Mittelhochdeutsche), sondern auch eine größtmögliche Anwendbarkeit auf mittelhochdeutsche Texte verschiedener Gattungen, Jahrhunderte und regionaler Varietäten erreichen und weiteren Arbeiten mit mittelhochdeutschen Text...

Die literaturwissenschaftliche Forschung hat im Anschluss an die Bemühungen von Meta Corssen (1930) zahlreiche Textmerkmale identifiziert, mit denen der Einfluss von Shakespeares ›Romeo und Julia‹ auf Kleists ›Familie Schroffenstein‹ zu belegen versucht wird. Angeführt werden dabei in der Regel Textelemente oder Texteigenschaften, die sowohl bei Sh...

In this paper, we describe computer-aided authorship testing on the Middle High German (MHG) text Apollonius von Tyrland written by Heinrich von Neustadt (HvN) in the late 13th century. Being based on a Latin original, HvN is suspected to incorporate other sources into the translation. We investigate assumptions regarding a segmentation of this tex...

Structural similarities across narratives play an important role in many areas of humanities research. In this article, we describe a methodology and an implementation to uncover such similarities automatically in two application scenarios. In both scenarios—ritual and folktale studies—existing research examines similarities of narratives on a stru...

This thesis is about the discovery of structural similarities across narrative texts. We will describe a method that is based on event alignments created automatically on automatically preprocessed texts. This opens up a path to large-scale empirical research on structural similarities across texts. Structural similarities are of interest for many...

This contribution investigates novel techniques for error detection in automatic semantic annotations, as an attempt to reconcile error-prone NLP processing with high quality standards required for empirical research in Digital Humanities. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of semantic NLP systems on a corpus of ritual texts and report...

In this paper we investigate the use of standard natural language processing (NLP) tools and annotation methods for processing linguistic data from ritual science, which is concerned with the study of structure and variance of rituals. The work is embedded in an interdisciplinary project that addresses this study by applying empirical and quantitat...

This paper presents a supervised approach for identifying generic noun phrases in context. Generic statements express rule-like knowledge about kinds or events. Therefore, their identification is important for the automatic construction of knowledge bases. In particular, the distinction between generic and non-generic statements is crucial for the...

This chapter is concerned with lexical enrichment of ontologies, that is how to enrich a given ontology with lexical information derived from a semantic lexicon such as WordNet or other lexical resources. The authors present an approach towards the integration of both types of resources, in particular for the human anatomy domain as represented by...

This paper is concerned with lexical enrichment of ontolo-gies, i.e. how to enrich a given ontology with lexical entries derived from a semantic lexicon. We present an approach towards the integration of both types of resources, in particular for the human anatomy domain as represented by the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). The paper describes...

The applicability of ontologies for natural language processing depends on the ability to link ontological concepts and relations to their realisations in texts. We present a general, resource-poor account to create such a linking automatically by extracting Wikipedia articles corresponding to ontology classes. We evaluate our approach in an experi...

This paper discusses our contribution to the third RTE Challenge -- the SALSA RTE system. It builds on an earlier system based on a relatively deep linguistic analysis, which we complement with a shallow component based on word overlap. We evaluate their (combined) performance on various data sets. However, earlier observations that the combination...

This paper discusses our contribution to the third RTE Challenge -- the SALSA RTE system. It builds on an earlier system based on a relatively deep linguistic analysis, which we complement with a shallow component based on word overlap. We evaluate their (combined) performance on various data sets. However, earlier observations that the combination...