Decision Tree-Based Evaluation of Genitive Classification – An Empirical Study on CMC and Text Corpora

Contemporary studies on the characteristics of natural language benefit enormously from the increasing amount of linguistic corpora. Aside from text and speech corpora, corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) position themselves between orality and literacy, and beyond that provide insight into the impact of “new”, mainly internet-based media on language behaviour. In this paper, we present an empirical attempt to work with annotated CMC corpora for the explanation of linguistic phenomena. In concrete terms, we implement machine learning algorithms to produce decision trees that reveal rules and tendencies about the use of genitive markers in German.