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We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity––i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning––might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.

Gender bias in machine translation can manifest when choosing gender inflections based on spurious gender correlations. For example, always translating doctors as men and nurses as women. This can be particularly harmful as models become more popular and deployed within commercial systems. Our work presents the largest evidence for the phenomenon in more than 19 systems submitted to the WMT over four diverse target languages: Czech, German, Polish, and Russian. To achieve this, we use WinoMT, a recent automatic test suite which examines gender coreference and bias when translating from English to languages with grammatical gender. We extend WinoMT to handle two new languages tested in WMT: Polish and Czech. We find that all systems consistently use spurious correlations in the data rather than meaningful contextual information. Comment: Accepted WMT20

Im Spätsommer 2016 begannen die Planungen der Open-Access-Teams der Freien Universität, der Humboldt-Universität und der Technischen Universität Berlin für die internationale Open Access Week 2016. In einem Call for Posters wurden Berliner und Brandenburger Open-Access-Projekte dazu aufgerufen, ihre Aktivitäten in einer Ausstellung vorzustellen. Die Publikation dokumentiert die Posterausstellung und Podiumsdiskussion zur Open Access Week 2016. Sie enthält 30 Poster inklusive Beschreibungen und Links zu den Originalversionen in Druckqualität, ergänzt um Fotos einer Abendveranstaltung bei Wikimedia Deutschland. In late summer 2016 the open access teams of the Freie Universität, the Humboldt-Universität and the Technische Universität Berlin started their plans for the international Open Access Week 2016. In a call for posters, open access projects from Berlin and Brandenburg were requested to present their activities in a poster exhibition. The publication documents the poster exhibition and panel discussion during the Open Access Week 2016. It contains all posters including abstracts and links to the original versions in print quality, supplemented by photos from the Wikimedia event. Not Reviewed