Including S wiss S tandard G erman in G erma N et (2019)

Abstract: GermaNet (Henrich and Hinrichs, 2010; Hamp and Feldweg, 1997) is a comprehensive wordnet of Standard German spoken in the Federal Republic of Germany. The GermaNet team aims at modelling the basic vocabulary of the language. German is an official language or a minority language in many countries. It is an official language in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, each with its own codified standard variety (Auer, 2014, p. 21), and also in Belgium, Liechtenstein, and Luxemburg. German is recognized as a minority language in thirteen additional countries, including Brasil, Italy, Poland, and Russia. However, the different standard varieties of German are currently not represented in GermaNet. With this project, we make a start on changing this by including one variety, namely Swiss Standard German, into GermaNet. This shall give a more inclusive perspective on the German language. We will argue that Swiss Standard German words, Helvetisms, are best included into the already existing wordnet GermaNet, rather than creating them as a separate wordnet.

## introduction germanet is a comprehensive wordnet of standard german spoken in the federal republic of germany. german is an official language or a minority language in many countries. it is an official language in austria, germany and switzerland, each with its own codified standard variety @xcite , and also in belgium, liechtenstein, and luxemburg. german is recognized as a minority language in thirteen additional countries, including brasil, italy, poland, and russia. however, the different standard varieties of german are currently not represented in germanet. more generally, among wordnets, there seems to be a lack of accounting for different standards of the same language. to the best of our knowledge, the princeton wordnet @xcite is the only wordnet so far which accounts for standard varities by marking specifically american or specifically british words. moreover, a colloquial wordnet of english has recently been created @xcite . therefore, it seems worthwhile integrating other german varieties into germanet. the central question to this paper, therefore, is how we can successfully model standard varieties. the present study focuses on swiss standard german @xcite . swiss stdg differs from german on all linguistic levels @xcite ). an orthographic difference pertains to the eszett ß ("sharp s"), which is in all cases replaced by ss in swiss stdg @xcite . there are also remarkable phonological differences, such as the primary stress of the initial syllable in, for instance, büffet @xcite . grammar differences are also found in word order, gender differences, and word derivation patterns. however, lexical differences are by far the most frequent @xcite . at a train station, swiss people buy a billet (german variant: fahrschein; "ticket") which they then show to a kondukteur (schaffner, "conductor") in the erstklasswagen (wagen der ersten klasse; "first class carriage"). since wordnets consist of lexemes, we are concerned with the lexical differences. as is common in the literature, we will refer to words which are idiosyncratic for swiss stdg as helvetisms and to those idiosyncratic for german stdg as teutonisms. our approach shall attain a broader representation of german in wordnets and offer a framework for other languages, of which different standard varieties exist, such as portuguese, swedish or french. the paper is structured as follows. first, we will give an overview of germanet (section 2). in section 3, we will demonstrate how words of swiss stdg can be collected from lexicographic sources (section 3.1) and by corpus-based methods (section 3.2). section 3.3 presents characteristic examples of swiss stdg words that have been harvested from lexicographic and corpusbased sources. section 4 suggests a framework of how to integrate swiss standard german . we conclude by discussing possible future work with regard to german varieties (section 5). ## germanet germanet is a lexical semantic network that is modelled after the princeton wordnet for english. the resource has been under development for more than twenty years and is still being extended on a continuous basis. the germanet team aims at constructing a lexical resource in digital form that models the basic vocabulary of the language. germanet covers the most frequently used german adjectives, nouns, and verbs. the coverage of germanet is determined by frequency lists compiled from very large digital text corpora of contemporary german. the current data release 13.0 of germanet contains 128,100 synsets, 164,814 lexical units, and 148,929 literals. in addition to the inventory of lexical and conceptual relations used in the princeton wordnet, germanet contains a set of lexical relations for nominal compounds. these relations indicate the semantic relations that hold between the constituent parts of a compound. compounds are also morphologically decomposed into their constituent parts. release 13.0 contains a total of 82,309 compounds that have been decomposed in this way @xcite . the coverage of germanet is by and large restricted to standard german. regional variants and colloquial terms are included only to the extent that they occur frequently in large text corpora and are widely understood. the concept "bread roll" is expressed in standard german by the lemma brötchen and has many regional variants. one such variant is the term wecken, which is included in germanet. wecken belongs to southern dialects of germany, but its meaning is widely known, and it occurs with considerable frequency in german corpus data. therefore, it is reasonable to include such a variant in germanet. compared to regional variants, colloquial words are included in germanet to a higher degree as long as their usage is stable over an extended period of time and as long as they are not offensive. germanet is also linked to the interlingual index (ili; vossen 1998) that is used to link wordnets for different languages. the synsets for current release of the germanet records can be linked to the ili via 28,566 ili records. the lexical units in germanet can also be linked to a total of 29,550 wiktionary sense descriptions @xcite . ## detecting and describing helvetisms switzerland distinguishes itself from austria and germany in the sense that swiss stdg is in a diglossic relationship with the swiss dialects. while swiss german dialects, so called mundarten, are used in everyday communication, swiss stdg occurs in written texts and in news media @xcite . the swiss german dialects align themselves with canton boundaries and are acquired as children's first language. swiss stdg is acquired only once children enter grade school. it is also worth noting that the german alemannic dialects form a continuum that straddles the german and swiss border. while it would be worthwhile to include regional varieties of both germany and switzerland, this project limits itself to the standard varieties only. in this section, we will discuss how relevant swiss stdg words can be acquired by lexicographic resources and by data-driven methods. ## introducing swiss stdg into the world of wordnets representing swiss stdg in a wordnet can be approached in two different ways. in this section, we discuss the two options and illustrate the approach we adopted by specific examples that show how to model swiss stdg words in a wordnet. ## discussion and future work in this paper, we have shown how to include swiss stdg into germanet by following the approach taken in the princeton wordnet for linking words from different standard varieties to regional domain pointers. we have emphasised the need for distinguishing between swiss mundarten and swiss stdg and have limited our modelling to the latter. as data sources, we have consulted both lexicographic sources and corpus material and have shown the relative merits of these two sources. it would be worthwhile to broaden the empirical base for identifying helvetisms by using other data sources, such as informant studies, a traditional method for collecting data on language varieties, and crowdsourcing, which has already been applied to collect colloquial words in a wordnet context by @xcite . once the integration of helvetisms into ger-manet has reached a stable state, the additional data will be released with the yearly updates of the germanet resource. germanet can be licensed a natural next step would be to extend the current approach to other standard varieties, such as the standard varieties spoken in lichtenstein and austria. these two countries are of particular interest since both border with switzerland, and austria also borders with germany. another variety of german worthwhile studying is the german spoken in luxembourg, a country with letzeburgisch, german and french as the three of-ficial languages. letzeburgisch has been officially recognised as an independent language, but historically has been influenced by dutch, french and german. another issue that we have only touched upon briefly in this paper is the modelling of regional varieties, such as the swiss mundarten or regional varieties spoken in germany. it would be interesting to explore to what extent the approach taken in the princeton wordnet and also in this paper to the treatment of standard varieties could be generalised to the treatment of regional varieties as well. here, we can only give some examples from different regional varieties of switzerland in ormodelling such variants in germanet would mean to include the variants, e.g. weggli, mütschli and schwööbli or grännä, briäggä and brüele, in one synset that also contains the lexical unit brötchen used in standard german. the regional variants are then linked to the appropriate domain pointers for the swiss cantons, while the lexeme brötchen remains unmarked.