On this blog, students will share their experiences, analyse their approaches and critically deal with their findings.
Prompts – Blog Entry 1
- What are problems and/or technical difficulties you have faced and how did you overcome them?
- Were there any mistakes in the software with the annotation? Can you categorise them?
- Were there any comprehension questions you’d like to pose in class?
Prompts – Blog Entry 2
- What do you think about the tendencies to the amount of (non-)English words and/or the amount of proper nouns?
- What do you think about the amount of non-English nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.? Are they in/correctly categorised? Do you see a pattern?
- Is there a POS distribution tendency?
- What do you think about the dependency relations of non-English nouns, verbs, etc.? Are they in/correctly categorised? Do you see a pattern?
- Is there a dependency relations tendency?
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ANNIS and Translations
ANNIS Working with ANNIS was easier for me as compared to the initial experience of working with spaCy, which I assume is because we had the experience of working with spaCy and sort of knew what each term meant. Initially, I had trouble getting ANNIS to work on my system (which I later understood was…
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ANNIS, analysis and machine translations
Working with ANNIS was a lot easier than on spaCy and it has a pretty user-friendly interface. The query-builder function in the software helped in not only identifying the tendencies that machine annotations have towards non-English words but also in quantifying these tendencies. For example, while we had already established that POS tagging for non-English…
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Analyzing multilingual sentences with ANNIS: Experience and Disappointments
Working with ANNIS has been a new experience for me, as I haven’t closely worked with corpus searches before. The interface was a bit overwhelming and confusing at first, but with some visual instructions it was easier to navigate the corpus. From our previous work on sentence annotation, I was already expecting a high number…
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The Proper Noun Problem – Working with ANNIS
Working with the software ANNIS and the corpus consisting of our novels’ example sentences, one of the predictions we had at the beginning of term came true: Machine annotation is indeed faulty and there is a tendency to classify non-English words as proper nouns. We already saw this tendency while working with Google Collab, but…
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Working with ANNIS on multilingual Sentences – Experience and Analysis
Set up and first impressions I found working with ANNIS both fun and insightful. I especially appreciated that query results displayed annotations and sentence dependencies immediately, unlike in Google Collab, where multiple intermediate steps were needed. This intuitive interface made ANNIS very user-friendly in my experience. After overcoming some initial difficulties with setting up combined…
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Working with ANNIS for the First Time
Working with our corpus and ANNIS was an interesting experience because it gave us the first overview of how our corpus looks and how we can use it to make deductions about our non-English novels as a whole. Playing around with different prompts showed a lot of interesting results but also conformed our findings from…
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ANNIS – Much Potential, Hindered by Machine Annotation
Experience Using ANNIS After getting used to the surface, I found ANNIS to be very user-friendly. The Query-Builder allows for a combination of all kinds of prompts. In theory, this could be used to find out how many non-English words in our corpus are proper nouns, nouns, adjectives, etc. Such information would be useful to…
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Analysing multilingual sentences with ANNIS
For me, working with ANNIS was much more fun than annotating sentences in Google Collab. I liked actually being able to get some quantifications out of the sentences we annotated. Although in the end the corpus we uploaded on ANNIS was not that extensive, it was still very interesting to see the possibilities the program…
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Using ANNIS as a Tool in Analysing Multilingual Sentences
To me, using ANNIS to study and interpret the annotations of our collective corpus was fun. But only after figuring out the limits and possibilities that diffeI focused on one particular area. It was possible to discover different patterns in regards to the mistakes that occur when tagging non-English words. I specifically enjoyed analysing the…
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ANNIS or Google Collab?
Well, they both are terribly bad at recognizing „foreign“ words (which basically means, any non-English words) in Multilingual structures where different languages are combined to create sentences. Honestly, I expected ANNIS to do a better job at annotating the multilingual words than Google Collab; however, they both annotated the words almost exactly the same. Having…
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Our corpus
Parts of speech Our corpus consists of 681 non-English and 3405 English words, meaning 4086 words in total. Here are some of the distributions as they were classified by the machine: Part of speech Total amount of part of speech Amount of non-English words Amount of English words Proper nouns 989 420 569 Nouns 606…
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Interpretation and Analysis (with reference to example sentences from Owuor’s novel Dust)
In class, we developed the hypothesis that the inclusion of nouns from a foreign language into a post-monolingual text might in general be more likely than the inclusion of other parts of speech. Our reasoning was that we deem their inclusion into an English sentence and therefore into the English syntax to be relatively easy…
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Multi-Lingual Annotations in Python with „A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers“
This was not my first time working with Python to figure out the tokens of sentences via computational means. However, my last time working with Python (in a linguistics BA seminar with Prof. Kevin Tang) has been some time back, so I have appreciated that working our example sentences through it has been made very…
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Annotating multilingual sentences in „America Is Not The Heart“ by Elaine Castillo
Working with Google Collab to do the sentence annotations wasn’t so scary to me because I was already familiar with some coding/programming and linguistics from my bachelor. However, I haven’t worked with both in combination like this before, so that was a new and interesting experience for me. I had no real problems working with…
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My experience with annotating multilingual sentences with Google Collab
My first experience with Google Colab was surprisingly positive. While the idea of working with a programming software seemed overwhelming at first, when we actually got to try using it during the seminar, it seemed quite intuitive and easy to navigate with the help of Ms. Pardey and the other students. The concept of syntactic…
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Annotating Multilingual Sentences in Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s „Stubborn Archivist“ – Experience & Observations
Initially, I was intrigued but also a bit worried about working on this project with Python, as previous linguistic research during my bachelor’s taught me that working with programming software can be a bit error-prone and frustrating at times. However, thanks to the prepared script, the annotation process via Google Colab and Python was very…
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Conversion and Annotation of Susan Abulhawa’s „The Blue Between Sky and Water“, or A Demonstration of Software Failure through Anglocentrism?
Introduction Having focused on reading literature through a postcolonial studies lens as well as on Eurocentric bias in the field of linguistics throughout my studies, the attempt of using conversion and annotation tools on a postcolonial post-monolingual Anglophone novel seemed intriguing. I was interested to see how it would deal with the novel I chose…
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Converting and Annotating Multilingual Sentences & Quotes – My Experience
Initially, I was very unsure about this task, because as someone who has focused on literature during their studies (for good reason), I am neither that good at linguistics, nor at programming or coding. While it seemed an intriguing task, there was also some apprehension on my part, looking at the Google Colab file for…
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Annotating Multilingual Sentences in „Hold“ by Michael Donkor: Twi and English
In his novel „Hold“, which was first published in 2018, Micheal Donkor continually weaves Twi words into English sentences, thus constructing a multilingual narrative. When he uses words in Twi, the author highlights them and sets them apart by italicizing them. Though much could be said about the function of this practice, it is a…
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Technical Difficulties and First Results of Annotating Multilingual Sentences in „The Moor’s Account“
First of all, I have been finding this work very interesting, getting a new perspective on literature. However, I encountered some technical difficulties while having Google Collab analyse my sentences. After three sentences, it told me I had reached my free limit and would have to purchase Collab Pro. This is probably because I tried…
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Experiences and observations on annotating the multilingual novel „The Dragonfly Sea“ by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Taking up the class of “Writing Across Languages – The Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novel”, I hadn’t really anticipated the extent to which we were going to work in the field of digital humanities. During my bachelor in literary studies and philosophy there was very little computational work involved and it is – mildly stated – not…
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Initial experiences in annotating multilingual text in Ocean Vuong’s „On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous“
I have always been fascinated by how literature and language studies have been influenced by digital fields such as coding and AI, so working on this project and studying the interdependencies between digital humanities and comparative studies has been a great learning experience. Having said that, it should be noted that I am not very…
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Multilingual Annotations
As someone who studies English and is interested in language and cultural multiplicity (but also aware of the existing hierarchies), I found our first assignment extremely fascinating; yet challenging. I have always been interested in linguistics, but never had the brain for it. It is as they say: Linguistics is the math (or even the…
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My Experience Converting and Annotating Multilingual Sentences
I have always been intrigued by the potential of using coding and programming software when it comes to languages, but as someone with no background in coding/programming, I have also been intimidated by it. So when we first tried out Google Colab in a session of Writing Across Languages: The Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novel, I was…
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Thoughts and Problems while Converting and Indexing Multilingual Sentences of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Afterlives
In the class „Writing across Languages: The Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novel“ we started working with digital tokenization, tagging, indexing and later annotating in order to – very broken down – take a look at how digital softwares react to multilingualism in novels. As most softwares and programmes are made in English-speaking countries for the English-speaking market…
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Initial thoughts on converting & annotating multilingual sentences + my experiences with examples from Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s „Dust“
From a literary translation point of view, I am very interested in the work with multilingual anglophone texts as it is something that I will probably come across quite a bit in the actual work as a translator of novels from English to German. The seminar „Writing Across Languages: The Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novel“ deals precisely…
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Problems (and correct classifications) in annotating training and example sentences in different languages from R. F. Kuang’s „Babel“: My experiences
Within the context of our seminar „Writing Across Languages: The Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novel“, our task was to test, how the software „Jupyter Notebook“, equipped with an English database, classified foreign words in a novel that is mostly written in English. The relevant categories were parts of speech and dependency tags. As „Jupyter Notebook“ was too…
My experience with annotating multilingual sentences with Google Collab My first experience with Google Colab was surprisingly positive. While the idea of working with a programming software seemed overwhelming at first, when we actually got to try using it during the seminar, it seemed quite intuitive and easy to navigate with the help of Ms. Pardey and the other students. The concept of syntactic trees and dependency relations was something I initially struggled with, considering my Introduction to Linguistics lecture was in 2017, and I have since mostly stayed in the field of Literary and Cultural Studies. Combined with the abbreviations of the different tags within the programme, it was difficult for me to understand the results Google Colab was showing me. However, the class discussion and the glossary, as well as some revision using Google were very helpful. What I also did was feed the programme simple sentences at first (think “I like apples.” “What is your favourite colour?”) to see what the results would look like with less complicated sentence structures. When I tried to annotate my own sentences from the novel “On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous”, I came across some difficulties, as I cannot understand Vietnamese and thus had to find out the structure of the Vietnamese passages myself first in order to verify Google Colab’s results. What I discovered was that the programme struggled to determine the Vietnamese words, which, to me, seems to be inevitable because, as I understand it, the programming language is only suitable for the English language(?). Because of this, the overall dependency relations were off, since my ex-ample sentences combined English and Vietnamese words in the same sentence but mostly without an indicator like an English preposition or determiner. I could not yet find a way to fix this problem but am very interested in what would be a solution in such cases. I am interested to learn about the others’ experiences with Google Colab and am keen to learn more about computer-based analysis of multilingual text.