Experiments on Lexical Chaining for German Corpora: Annotation, Extraction, and Application
Irene Cramer, Marc Finthammer, Alexander Kurek, Lukas Sowa, Melina Wachtling, Tobias Claas · LDV-Forum/Journal for language technology and computational linguistics · 2008
Converting linear text documents into documents publishable in a hypertext environment is a complex task requiring methods for segmentation, reorganization, and linking. The HyTex project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), aims at the development of conversion strategies based on text-grammatical features. One focus of our work is on topic-based linking strategies using lexical chains, which can be regarded as partial text representations and form the basis of calculating topic views, an example of which is shown in Figure 1. This paper discusses the development of our lexical chainer, called GLexi, as well as several experiments on two aspects: Firstly, the manual annotation of lexical chains in German corpora of specialized text; secondly, the construction of topic views. The principle of lexical chaining is based on the concept of lexical cohesion as described by Halliday and Hasan (1976). Morris and Hirst (1991) as well as Hirst and St-Onge (1998) developed a method of automatically calculating lexical chains by drawing on a thesaurus or word net. This method employs information on semantic relations between pairs of words as a connector, i.e. classical lexical semantic relations such as synonymy and hypernymy