Congratulations on Passing the Doctoral Examination

The title of her dissertation is “Automated Methods for the Concept-Based Interlinking of Historical Dictionaries as Linked Open Data: Opportunities and Challenges.”

Like many retrospectively digitized historical dictionaries, German-language dialect dictionaries are largely published in isolation and remain unconnected on the web, despite their considerable potential for interlinking. The Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm is regarded as a suitable approach for linking lexical resources, as meanings can be modeled through the principle of “semantics by reference” by connecting lemmas to ontological concepts. However, practical automated solutions for such lexical-semantic mapping have so far been lacking.

Using West Central German dialect dictionaries as a case study and focusing exemplarily on the semantic field of drinking, the dissertation investigates three methods for the automated semantic interlinking of dictionary entries: string-based matching, fine-tuned embeddings using ModernGBERT, and the application of the large language model Llama 3.3. The data basis for the interlinking process and its evaluation is provided by a corpus annotated with a gold standard. A project-specific controlled vocabulary defines the concepts that serve both as the reference layer for the links and as an interface to the Semantic Web.

In particular, the use of the fine-tuned language model ModernGBERT and the large language model Llama offers a practical solution for the LOD-based linking of lexicographic data. The publication of the interconnected data in the DiaLexBase Wikibase instance demonstrates the applicability of this approach and opens up new perspectives, especially for connecting older lexicographic resources as Linked Open Data and thereby creating novel onomasiological access points, search options, and possibilities for integration.

Anne Klee completed her Bachelor of Arts in 2015 and her Master of Arts in 2017 at Trier University in German Studies and History. Building on this background, she began a Master's degree in Digital Humanities at Trier University in 2017, which she successfully completed in 2019 with a Master of Science degree. From 2015 until mid-2017, she worked as a student research assistant in the project Middle High German Dictionary (Trier office of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature). Beginning in 2018, she continued her work at the TCDH as a student research assistant, contributing, among others, to the projects EdView and Digitization of the Revised Edition of the German Dictionary. Since 2020, she has been employed as a research associate at the TCDH and has worked on projects including ELEXIS, Text+, MiMoText, and LODinG.

The entire TCDH team warmly congratulates Anne Klee on successfully defending her dissertation and wishes her all the best for the future.