American Words and Ways, Especially for German Americans

ParTiciPaTion of Young african americans esPeciallY sTrong

Nearly two million more young Americans under the age of 30 voted in the 2008 presidential elections as compared to the 2004 elections, according to new Census data analyzed and released by CIRCLE. The increase is a continuation of the trend observed in the 2004 and 2006 elections. Youth turnout was 11 percentage points higher than in 1996, which was the low point after decades of decline. Whil...

A Comparison of German Names and German Words

German names are more difficult to read and write than German words. This paper presents evidence for this fact that allows for explanations of this behaviour by investigating the frequency, orthography, phonetic structure and interplay between written and spoken words. The consequences of the findings for future automated processing of names are recommended. INTRODUCTION It is commonly accepte...

The Ways and Means of American Medicine

Informed ways of improving data-driven dependency parsing for German

We investigate a series of targeted modifications to a data-driven dependency parser of German and show that these can be highly effective even for a relatively well studied language like German if they are made on a (linguistically and methodologically) informed basis and with a parser implementation that allows for fast and robust training and application. Making relatively small changes to a...

MorphoClass - Recognition and Morphological Classification of Unknown Words for German

A system for recognition and morphological classification of unknown words for German is described and evaluated. It takes raw text as input and outputs a list of the unknown nouns together with a hypothesis about their possible morphological class and stem. MorphoClass exploits global information (ending-guessing rules, maximum likelihood estimations, word frequency statistics), morphological ...