Laura Herzberg’s research while affiliated with University of Mannheim and other places

The present volume is intended as a reference book on Wikipedia corpus studies, from corpus construction to exploration and analysis. Wikipedia is a complex object, difficult to manipulate for linguists and corpus researchers. In addition to the encyclopedic articles consulted by millions of users, it contains vast spaces of written discussions, aka talk pages, where Wikipedia authors negotiate the collaborative editing of articles, make evaluations, or discuss related topics. The proposed volume covers Wikipedia articles, their revision histories, and discussions, with a focus on discussions, which have not been studied extensively so far and have also been neglected in previous corpus building efforts. Wikipedia discussions are instances of computer-mediated communication (CMC), thus constituting a completely different, interaction-oriented linguistic genre. Sophisticated tools and methods of linguistic annotation and corpus exploration are needed to exploit the huge and valuable corpus resources that can be constructed from the Wikipedia discussions. The present volume aims at encouraging and facilitating Wikipedia corpus studies, providing standards, recommendations, and innovative methods to build and explore Wikipedia corpora, and presenting corpus studies that make the most of the peculiarities of Wikipedia.

Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die Forschungsfelder der Wikipedistik und Wikipedaktik. Die Wikipedistik umfasst Arbeiten aus der Linguistik, die sich mit der Online-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia und Wikis allgemein befassen. In der Wikipedaktik wird das didaktische Potenzial der Wikipedia als Reflexionsgegenstand, Lehr-Lern-Plattform und Ort digitaler Partizipation beleuchtet.

This paper presents types and annotation layers of reply relations in computer- mediated communication (CMC). Reply relations hold between post units in CMC interactions and describe references from one given post to a previous post. We classify three types of reply relations in CMC interactions: first, technical replies, i.e. the possibility to reply directly to a previous post by clicking a ‘reply’ button; second, indentations, e.g. in wiki talk pages in which users insert their contributions in the existing talk page by indenting them and third, interpretative reply relations, i.e. the reply action is not realised formally but signalled by other structural or linguistics means such as address markers ‘@’, greetings, citations and/or Q-A structures. We take a look at existing practices in the description and representation of such relations in corpora and examples of chat, Wikipedia talk pages, Twitter and blogs. We then provide an annotation proposal that combines the different levels of description and representation of reply relations and which adheres to the schemas and practices for encoding CMC corpus documents within the TEI framework as defined by the TEI CMC SIG. It constitutes a prerequisite for correctly identifying higher levels of interactional relations such as dialogue acts or discussion trees.