In der Lehre und der Forschung einer Universität gibt es nicht nur viele spannende Themen, sondern auch viele Tools, die zum Teil vor Ort (weiter)entwickelt oder speziell angepasst wurden.
In loser Folge möchten wir in dieser Reihe einige davon vorstellen.
Bei Interesse freuen sich die Wissenschaftler:innen über eine Kontaktaufnahme!
Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) is a Part of Speech (POS) tagger of English.
POS tagging is a common process in linguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing, and there are many tools available.
MFTE is a specific kind of POS tagger that only tags for those lexico-grammatical features that may be interesting for the study of register or situational variation.
For example, in conversations first and second person pronouns are used highly frequently. On the other hand, in text books one sees a lot of nouns and prepositional phrases. These linguistic features are not in there by chance, but occur due to different situational demands of these two types of ‚registers‘.
Conversations need to be in real-time, people know each other, every time calling each other with names is odd. That is why people use ‚you‘ to refer to the other person and ‚I‘ to refer to themself.
Similarly, text books are supposed to teach about something, and in many cases full of new information. The linguistic features ’nouns‘ and ‚prepositional phrases‘ are, thus, needed in this situational variety (or ‚register‘).
MFTE tags for the above mentioned features and more than 100 other such features for the English language.
More details about register variations can be found in the 2019 book „Register, Genre, and Style“ by Douglas Biberand Susan Conrad 2019
More details about MFTE can be found in the 2024 article „The Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE): Rationale, description and evaluation“ by Elen Le Foll and Muhammad Shakir in the journal Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL).
Dr. Muhammad Shakir
Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Variationslinguistik im Englischen Seminar der Universität Münster
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