PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

Chapter 3. Tracking English Inclusions in German 49
tool based on NXT (Carletta et al., 2003) which operates with stand-off XML input
and output. The binary annotation distinguishes between two classes using the BIO-
encoding (Ramshaw and Marcus, 1995): English inclusion tokens are marked as I-EN
(inside an English token) and any token that falls outside this category is marked as O
(Outside). As the annotation was performed on the level of the token (and not phrase),
an English inclusion received the tag B-EN only if it was preceded by another English
inclusion. The annotation guidelines, which are presented in detail in Appendix B,
specified to the annotators to mark as English inclusions:
• all tokens that are English words even if part of NEs: Google
• all abbreviations that expand to English terms: ISS
• compounds that are made up of two English words: Bluetooth
For the evaluation, it was also decided to ignore English-like person and location
names as well as English inclusions occurring:
• as part of URLs: www.stepstone.de
• in mixed-lingual unhyphenated compounds: Shuttleflug (shuttle flight)
• with German inflections: Receivern (with German dative plural case inflection)
Further morphological analysis is required to recognise these. These issues will be
addressed in future work when mixed-lingual compounds and inflected inclusions also
need to be represented in the gold standard annotation.
Table 3.1 provides some corpus statistics for each domain and presents the number
of English inclusions annotated in the various gold standard development and test sets.
Interestingly, the percentage of English inclusions varies considerably across all three
domains. There are considerably more English tokens present in the articles on the
internet & telecoms and space travel than in those on the EU. This result seemed sur-
prising at first as the development of the EU has facilitated increasing contact between
German and English speaking cultures. However, political structures and concepts are
intrinsic parts of individual cultures and therefore tend to have their own expressions.
Moreover, EU legislation is translated into all its official languages, currently number-
ing 23. This language policy renders English less dominant in this domain than was