AET: Web-based Adjective Exploration Tool for German

Tatiana Bladier, Esther Seyffarth, Oliver Hellwig, Wiebke Petersen

Abstract: We present a new web-based corpus query tool, the Adjective Exploration Tool (AET), which enables research on the modificational behavior of German adjectives and adverbs. The tool can also be transferred to other languages and modification phenomena. The underlying database is derived from a corpus of German print media texts, which we annnotated with dependency parses and several morphological, lexical, and statistical properties of the tokens. We extracted pairs of adjectives and adverbs (modifiers) as well as the tokens modified by them (modifiees) from the corpus and stored them in a way that makes the modifier-modifiee pairs easily searchable. With AET, linguists from different research areas can access corpus samples using an intuitive query language and user-friendly web interface. AET has been developed as a part of a collaborative research project that focuses on the compositional interaction of attributive adjectives with nouns and the interplay of events and adverbial modifiers. The tool is easy to extend and update and is free to use online without registration: http://aet.phil.hhu.de