Vortrag: Philipp Heinrich & Florian Meinicke (11.06.2025)
Im Rahmen des Oberseminars Computerlinguistik findet am 11.06.2025 ein Vortrag statt, zu dem wir herzlich einladen.
Vortragende: Philipp Heinrich (FAU, Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik) & Florian Meinicke (freiberuflicher Web-Entwickler)
Zeit: Mittwoch, 11.06.2025, 16:15–17:45 Uhr
Ort: CIP-Pool Computerlinguistik, Bismarckstr. 12, Raum 0.320
Thema: „The MMDA Toolkit Reloaded: Interactive Discourse Analysis with Discoursemes“
The MMDA toolkit is open-source software designed to support interactive discourse analysis grounded in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). At the core of the toolkit is the concept of the discourseme – a minimal unit of lexical meaning specific to a given discourse – which contributes to the methodological harmonisation of CADS. Discoursemes enable researchers to construct intensional meaning descriptions while operationalising them through well-defined queries for concordancing and quantitative analyses, bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative methods. The MMDA toolkit is a React.js frontend leveraging the APIFlask backend cwb-cads, offering a user-friendly, web-based environment for dynamically exploring discoursemes. We reflect on the long and winding development path of the toolkit – from its first prototype in 2017 to its current version – highlighting the challenges of balancing flexibility with functionality. Development was especially difficult because the open-source landscape of corpus linguistics is dominated by general-purpose tools such as CWB and CQPweb, and because of a lack of dedicated, usable libraries for CADS-specific tasks. The presentation will include an interactive demonstration of MMDA’s capabilities and discuss its contributions to our broader goal of reproducible and extensible CADS.