Presentation of the paper Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST) by Maximilian Hadersbeck, Alois Pichler, Florian Fink and Øyvind Liland Gjesdal in DATeCH 2014. #digidays

1. Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein
Advanced Search Tools (WAST)
Presentation DaTECH2014
Florian Fink
Centrum f¨ur Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung (CIS) LMU
May 19, 2014
Florian Fink Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST1/20

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889 - 1951) left behind 20,000 pages of his
philosophical manuscripts and typescripts – the so-called
Wittgensteins Nachlass.
• In 2000 the Wittgenstein Archives at the University Bergen (WAB)
published this Nachlass as an electronic edition called Bergen
Electronic Edition (BEE).
• In 2009, WAB made additionally 5000 pages freely available on the
web.
• In 2010 a cooperation between Dr. Alois Pichler and the Center for
Information and Language Processing started on the Nachlass.
Florian Fink Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST2/20

3. Wittgenstein in Co-Text
The The Widgenstein in Co-Text project
is a cooperation of the Wittgenstein Archive Bergen
and the Center of Information- and Language Processing,
Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. Its goal is to
discover new tools that help researchers from different fields to explore and
research the works of Ludwig Widgenstein.
• Dr. Maximilian Hadersbeck (LMU M¨unchen)
• Dr. Alois Pichler (Wittgenstein Archive Bergen)
• Øyvind Liland Gjesdal (Wittgenstein Archive Bergen)
• Florian Fink (LMU M¨unchen)
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4. Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST)
In order to provide new possibilities for researchers, the Wittgenstein
Advanced Search Tools (WAST) offer local grammar based search
capabilities on the Nachlass.
• Simple interface for even complex queries
• Lemmatized vs simple full text search capabilities
• Integration of Semantic and syntactic informations
• Integration of part-of-speech information
• Presentation of the search results within the original documents
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5. The front end of WAST I
The web-based front-end of WAST provides access to the text and
displays the results of queries. The results are shown in their normalized
form, showing the sentences that contain the query and a small snipped of
the original document.
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6. The front end of WAST II
Each sentence of the result set contains various links to external
Wittgenstein resources.
• The according sentence in the Wittgenstein Source of the University
of Bergen
• Pundit.
• A highlighted sentence within the original facsimile.
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7. Highlighting of the facsimile
The highlighter is used to directly show the result of queries in scans of
the original page of the according facsimile. This enables researchers to
see the context of his search in a greater context.
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8. Expanding of the search results
The normalized view can also be expanded to further study the context of
the results. He is able to examine the text and is able to see changes and
alternatives interpolated by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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9. Searching the Nachlass
The tool that searches over the Nachlass of Ludwig Wittgenstein is called
Wittfind.
It is used to search the text for words and phrases within sentences, since
Ludwig Wittgenstein sees them as central to the meaning of words
(Tractatus logico philosophicus [22, 3.3]):
Nur der Satz hat Sinn; nur im Zusammenhang des Satzes hat ein
Name Bedeutung1
1
Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have
meaning
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10. Wittfind
To find the phrases Wittfind internally executes search graphs on the text.
These search graphs facilitate the use of concatenations, alternatives and
sequences of token in the queries.
You can specify queries that
• search for a token A or B
• search for a token A followed by a token B
• search for a token A followed by zero or more sequences of a token B
Florian Fink Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST10/20

11. Search graphs
The phrase search of Wittfind is comparable to algorithms that search for
regular expressions in text. They are transformed to nondeterministic finite
automata (NFA) and used for the searching phase.
Whereas the automata of regular expressions match on a single character
basis, the automata of the search graphs match on the token of the text.
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12. Pattern matching I
Wittfind is able to resort on different policies and resources in its search
phase. The syntax of the token matching builds upon the syntax of
Unitex, but expands it where appropriate.
• simple string matching
• matching on part-of-speech tags
• matching on regular expressions
• matching on special token classes (words, numbers, etc.)
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13. Pattern matching II
Apart from simple string-based matching of the token, Wittfind uses a
background dictionary for additional morphological, syntactical and
semantic Information.
• lemmatized matching (“dachte” matches queries for its lemma
“denken”)
• inverse lemmatized matching (“gedacht” matches “dachte” because
they share a common lemma “denken”)
• matching on morphological and syntactical forms (verbs, adjectives,
etc.)
• matching based on the semantic of the token as it is provided in the
dictionary.
Florian Fink Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST13/20

14. Queries
While it is possible to directly draw search graphs and execute them2,
Wittfind also accepts flat queries.
These queries are transformed to search graphs automatically. The
algorithm used to accomplish this is similar to the algorithms, that create
NFA’s from regular expressions.
2
There is an experimental online graph editor
that allows you to do exactly this.
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15. Wittfind client-server
Wittfind uses additional lexical resources in form of a background
dictionary. In order to avoid redundant loading of these resources for each
query Wittfind is split in one server and client part.
• The server loads all resources and texts once and optimizes their
usage.
• The client applies a preprocessing step to the query and sends it to
the server to execute it.
• The client applies the matches from the server to the text and
displays the results of the query.
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16. Expanding WAST to other texts
WAST as presented here evolved around the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and many of its features come directly from the ideas and needs of
Wittgenstein researchers.
But most of the tools are modular and able to work on any text. The core
tool of the local grammar search Wittfind can be easily used to search any
compatible collection of texts. Since it returns the sentences in the original
document without modifying it, any tool that works on the original text
should work on the results as well.
To use all features on needs:
• A TEI-5 compatible text (optionally with part-of-speech tags)
• An extensive full form dictionary
Florian Fink Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: WiTTFind and Wittgenstein Advanced Search Tools (WAST16/20

17. Further work on WAST
The development on WAST has always been supported by various students
of the CIS. Some centered their bachelor or master thesis around different
aspects of the tool set. There are other projects finished and about to
finish.
• Wittfind webservice
• Facsimile Highlighter (M. Lindinger)
• Facsimile Reader based on the Highlighter
• Large Helppage with a collection of example search queries (A. Krey)
• Semantic Search offering simple usage of the different semantic
classes in WAST including specialized classes to exploit the theory of
color of Ludwig Wittgenstein (A. Krey)
• Online graph editor (Y. Kalasouskaya)
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18. Online graph editor
The online graph editor is a tool that allows people to draw search graphs
and execute them directly on the Nachlass.
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19. Urls
• Wittgenstein Archive Bergen http://wab.uib.no/
• Wittgenstein Source http://www.wittgensteinsource.org
• Pundit http://feed.thepund.it/
• WAST http://wittfind.cis.lmu.de
• CIS http://www.cis.lmu.de
• Wittgenstein in Co-Text http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/
forschung/ehumanities/research-group-co/index.html
• Graph search presentation: http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/
kurse/max/scholarship/finkwf.pdf
• Wittgenstein scholarship:
http://wastwiki.cis.uni-muenchen.de/wiki/Scholarship
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20. Thanks for your attention!
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