TYTO – A Collaborative Research Tool for Linked Linguistic Data

Abstract In this paper, I introduce a computational tool, TYTO (“Typology Tool”), that utilises Semantic Web technologies in order to provide novel ways to process, integrate, and query cross-linguistic data. Its data store incorporates a set of on-tologies (comprising linguistic examples, annotations, language background infor-mation, and metadata) backed by a logic reasoner software. This allows for highly targeted querying, and, with enough data on the relevant interest areas, TYTO can return answers to rather specific typological questions such as ‘Which other lan-guages in the North America, in addition to Yuchi, do encode senior kin and in-group (such as belonging to the same ethnic group) in a suffixal case marking sys-tem? ’ TYTO’s data store can be extended with additional ontologies and adapted to allow for project-specific analyses of linguistic data. It is further designed to facilitate collaboration and allow multi-user contributions, including automatic in-tegration of data submitted at different stages by different contributors.

Development of linguistic linked open data resources for collaborative data-intensive research in the language sciences

Making diverse data in linguistics and the language sciences open, distributed, and accessible: perspectives from language/language acquistiion researchers and technical LOD (linked open data) researchers. This volume examines the challenges inherent in making diverse data in linguistics and the language sciences open, distributed, integrated, and accessible, thus fostering wide data sharing and collaboration. It is unique in integrating the perspectives of language researchers and technical LOD (linked open data) researchers. Reporting on both active research needs in the field of language acquisition and technical advances in the development of data interoperability, the book demonstrates the advantages of an international infrastructure for scholarship in the field of language sciences. With contributions by researchers who produce complex data content and scholars involved in both the technology and the conceptual foundations of LLOD (linguistics linked open data), the book focuses on the area of language acquisition because it involves complex and diverse data sets, cross-linguistic analyses, and urgent collaborative research. The contributors discuss a variety of research methods, resources, and infrastructures. Contributors Isabelle Barrière, Nan Bernstein Ratner, Steven Bird, Maria Blume, Ted Caldwell, Christian Chiarcos, Cristina Dye, Suzanne Flynn, Claire Foley, Nancy Ide, Carissa Kang, D. Terence Langendoen, Barbara Lust, Brian MacWhinney, Jonathan Masci, Steven Moran, Antonio Pareja-Lora, Jim Reidy, Oya Y. Rieger, Gary F. Simons, Thorsten Trippel, Kara Warburton, Sue Ellen Wright, Claus Zin

Development of Linguistic Linked Open Data Resources for Collaborative Data-Intensive Research in the Language Sciences

This book is the product of an international workshop dedicated to addressing data accessibility in the linguistics field. It is therefore vital to the book’s mission that its content be open access. Linguistics as a field remains behind many others as far as data management and accessibility strategies. The problem is particularly acute in the subfield of language acquisition, where international linguistic sound files are needed for reference. Linguists' concerns are very much tied to amount of information accumulated by individual researchers over the years that remains fragmented and inaccessible to the larger community. These concerns are shared by other fields, but linguistics to date has seen few efforts at addressing them. This collection, undertaken by a range of leading experts in the field, represents a big step forward. Its international scope and interdisciplinary combination of scholars/librarians/data consultants will provide an important contribution to the field

Integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Language Resources Using Linked Data

This thesis is a compendium of scientific works and engineering specifications that have been contributed to a large community of stakeholders to be copied, adapted, mixed, built upon and exploited in any way possible to achieve a common goal: Integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Language Resources Using Linked Data The explosion of information technology in the last two decades has led to a substantial growth in quantity, diversity and complexity of web-accessible linguistic data. These resources become even more useful when linked with each other and the last few years have seen the emergence of numerous approaches in various disciplines concerned with linguistic resources and NLP tools. It is the challenge of our time to store, interlink and exploit this wealth of data accumulated in more than half a century of computational linguistics, of empirical, corpus-based study of language, and of computational lexicography in all its heterogeneity. The vision of the Giant Global Graph (GGG) was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee aiming at connecting all data on the Web and allowing to discover new relations between this openly-accessible data. This vision has been pursued by the Linked Open Data (LOD) community, where the cloud of published datasets comprises 295 data repositories and more than 30 billion RDF triples (as of September 2011). RDF is based on globally unique and accessible URIs and it was specifically designed to establish links between such URIs (or resources). This is captured in the Linked Data paradigm that postulates four rules: (1) Referred entities should be designated by URIs, (2) these URIs should be resolvable over HTTP, (3) data should be represented by means of standards such as RDF, (4) and a resource should include links to other resources. Although it is difficult to precisely identify the reasons for the success of the LOD effort, advocates generally argue that open licenses as well as open access are key enablers for the growth of such a network as they provide a strong incentive for collaboration and contribution by third parties. In his keynote at BNCOD 2011, Chris Bizer argued that with RDF the overall data integration effort can be “split between data publishers, third parties, and the data consumer”, a claim that can be substantiated by observing the evolution of many large data sets constituting the LOD cloud. As written in the acknowledgement section, parts of this thesis has received numerous feedback from other scientists, practitioners and industry in many different ways. The main contributions of this thesis are summarized here: Part I – Introduction and Background. During his keynote at the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference in 2012, Sören Auer stressed the decentralized, collaborative, interlinked and interoperable nature of the Web of Data. The keynote provides strong evidence that Semantic Web technologies such as Linked Data are on its way to become main stream for the representation of language resources. The jointly written companion publication for the keynote was later extended as a book chapter in The People’s Web Meets NLP and serves as the basis for “Introduction” and “Background”, outlining some stages of the Linked Data publication and refinement chain. Both chapters stress the importance of open licenses and open access as an enabler for collaboration, the ability to interlink data on the Web as a key feature of RDF as well as provide a discussion about scalability issues and decentralization. Furthermore, we elaborate on how conceptual interoperability can be achieved by (1) re-using vocabularies, (2) agile ontology development, (3) meetings to refine and adapt ontologies and (4) tool support to enrich ontologies and match schemata. Part II - Language Resources as Linked Data. “Linked Data in Linguistics” and “NLP & DBpedia, an Upward Knowledge Acquisition Spiral” summarize the results of the Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL) Workshop in 2012 and the NLP & DBpedia Workshop in 2013 and give a preview of the MLOD special issue. In total, five proceedings – three published at CEUR (OKCon 2011, WoLE 2012, NLP & DBpedia 2013), one Springer book (Linked Data in Linguistics, LDL 2012) and one journal special issue (Multilingual Linked Open Data, MLOD to appear) – have been (co-)edited to create incentives for scientists to convert and publish Linked Data and thus to contribute open and/or linguistic data to the LOD cloud. Based on the disseminated call for papers, 152 authors contributed one or more accepted submissions to our venues and 120 reviewers were involved in peer-reviewing. “DBpedia as a Multilingual Language Resource” and “Leveraging the Crowdsourcing of Lexical Resources for Bootstrapping a Linguistic Linked Data Cloud” contain this thesis’ contribution to the DBpedia Project in order to further increase the size and inter-linkage of the LOD Cloud with lexical-semantic resources. Our contribution comprises extracted data from Wiktionary (an online, collaborative dictionary similar to Wikipedia) in more than four languages (now six) as well as language-specific versions of DBpedia, including a quality assessment of inter-language links between Wikipedia editions and internationalized content negotiation rules for Linked Data. In particular the work described in created the foundation for a DBpedia Internationalisation Committee with members from over 15 different languages with the common goal to push DBpedia as a free and open multilingual language resource. Part III - The NLP Interchange Format (NIF). “NIF 2.0 Core Specification”, “NIF 2.0 Resources and Architecture” and “Evaluation and Related Work” constitute one of the main contribution of this thesis. The NLP Interchange Format (NIF) is an RDF/OWL-based format that aims to achieve interoperability between Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, language resources and annotations. The core specification is included in and describes which URI schemes and RDF vocabularies must be used for (parts of) natural language texts and annotations in order to create an RDF/OWL-based interoperability layer with NIF built upon Unicode Code Points in Normal Form C. In , classes and properties of the NIF Core Ontology are described to formally define the relations between text, substrings and their URI schemes. contains the evaluation of NIF. In a questionnaire, we asked questions to 13 developers using NIF. UIMA, GATE and Stanbol are extensible NLP frameworks and NIF was not yet able to provide off-the-shelf NLP domain ontologies for all possible domains, but only for the plugins used in this study. After inspecting the software, the developers agreed however that NIF is adequate enough to provide a generic RDF output based on NIF using literal objects for annotations. All developers were able to map the internal data structure to NIF URIs to serialize RDF output (Adequacy). The development effort in hours (ranging between 3 and 40 hours) as well as the number of code lines (ranging between 110 and 445) suggest, that the implementation of NIF wrappers is easy and fast for an average developer. Furthermore the evaluation contains a comparison to other formats and an evaluation of the available URI schemes for web annotation. In order to collect input from the wide group of stakeholders, a total of 16 presentations were given with extensive discussions and feedback, which has lead to a constant improvement of NIF from 2010 until 2013. After the release of NIF (Version 1.0) in November 2011, a total of 32 vocabulary employments and implementations for different NLP tools and converters were reported (8 by the (co-)authors, including Wiki-link corpus, 13 by people participating in our survey and 11 more, of which we have heard). Several roll-out meetings and tutorials were held (e.g. in Leipzig and Prague in 2013) and are planned (e.g. at LREC 2014). Part IV - The NLP Interchange Format in Use. “Use Cases and Applications for NIF” and “Publication of Corpora using NIF” describe 8 concrete instances where NIF has been successfully used. One major contribution in is the usage of NIF as the recommended RDF mapping in the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 W3C standard and the conversion algorithms from ITS to NIF and back. One outcome of the discussions in the standardization meetings and telephone conferences for ITS 2.0 resulted in the conclusion there was no alternative RDF format or vocabulary other than NIF with the required features to fulfill the working group charter. Five further uses of NIF are described for the Ontology of Linguistic Annotations (OLiA), the RDFaCE tool, the Tiger Corpus Navigator, the OntosFeeder and visualisations of NIF using the RelFinder tool. These 8 instances provide an implemented proof-of-concept of the features of NIF. starts with describing the conversion and hosting of the huge Google Wikilinks corpus with 40 million annotations for 3 million web sites. The resulting RDF dump contains 477 million triples in a 5.6 GB compressed dump file in turtle syntax. describes how NIF can be used to publish extracted facts from news feeds in the RDFLiveNews tool as Linked Data. Part V - Conclusions. provides lessons learned for NIF, conclusions and an outlook on future work. Most of the contributions are already summarized above. One particular aspect worth mentioning is the increasing number of NIF-formated corpora for Named Entity Recognition (NER) that have come into existence after the publication of the main NIF paper Integrating NLP using Linked Data at ISWC 2013. These include the corpora converted by Steinmetz, Knuth and Sack for the NLP & DBpedia workshop and an OpenNLP-based CoNLL converter by Brümmer. Furthermore, we are aware of three LREC 2014 submissions that leverage NIF: NIF4OGGD - NLP Interchange Format for Open German Governmental Data, N^3 – A Collection of Datasets for Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation in the NLP Interchange Format and Global Intelligent Content: Active Curation of Language Resources using Linked Data as well as an early implementation of a GATE-based NER/NEL evaluation framework by Dojchinovski and Kliegr. Further funding for the maintenance, interlinking and publication of Linguistic Linked Data as well as support and improvements of NIF is available via the expiring LOD2 EU project, as well as the CSA EU project called LIDER, which started in November 2013. Based on the evidence of successful adoption presented in this thesis, we can expect a decent to high chance of reaching critical mass of Linked Data technology as well as the NIF standard in the field of Natural Language Processing and Language Resources.:CONTENTS i introduction and background 1 1 introduction 3 1.1 Natural Language Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 Open licenses, open access and collaboration . . . . . . 5 1.3 Linked Data in Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4 NLP for and by the Semantic Web – the NLP Inter- change Format (NIF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.5 Requirements for NLP Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1.6 Overview and Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2 background 15 2.1 The Working Group on Open Data in Linguistics (OWLG) 15 2.1.1 The Open Knowledge Foundation . . . . . . . . 15 2.1.2 Goals of the Open Linguistics Working Group . 16 2.1.3 Open linguistics resources, problems and chal- lenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1.4 Recent activities and on-going developments . . 18 2.2 Technological Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.3 RDF as a data model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 2.4 Performance and scalability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 2.5 Conceptual interoperability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 ii language resources as linked data 25 3 linked data in linguistics 27 3.1 Lexical Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 3.2 Linguistic Corpora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3.3 Linguistic Knowledgebases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.4 Towards a Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud . . . . . 32 3.5 State of the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud in 2012 33 3.6 Querying linked resources in the LLOD . . . . . . . . . 36 3.6.1 Enriching metadata repositories with linguistic features (Glottolog → OLiA) . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.6.2 Enriching lexical-semantic resources with lin- guistic information (DBpedia (→ POWLA) → OLiA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 4 DBpedia as a multilingual language resource: the case of the greek dbpedia edition. 39 4.1 Current state of the internationalization effort . . . . . 40 4.2 Language-specific design of DBpedia resource identifiers 41 4.3 Inter-DBpedia linking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 4.4 Outlook on DBpedia Internationalization . . . . . . . . 44 5 leveraging the crowdsourcing of lexical resources for bootstrapping a linguistic linked data cloud 47 5.1 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 5.2 Problem Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 5.2.1 Processing Wiki Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 5.2.2 Wiktionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 5.2.3 Wiki-scale Data Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 5.3 Design and Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 5.3.1 Extraction Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 5.3.2 Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 5.3.3 Language Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 5.3.4 Schema Mediation by Annotation with lemon . 58 5.4 Resulting Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 5.5 Lessons Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 5.6 Discussion and Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 5.6.1 Next Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.6.2 Open Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 6 nlp & dbpedia, an upward knowledge acquisition spiral 63 6.1 Knowledge acquisition and structuring . . . . . . . . . 64 6.2 Representation of knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 6.3 NLP tasks and applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 6.3.1 Named Entity Recognition . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 6.3.2 Relation extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 6.3.3 Question Answering over Linked Data . . . . . 67 6.4 Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 6.4.1 Gold and silver standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 6.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 iii the nlp interchange format (nif) 73 7 nif 2.0 core specification 75 7.1 Conformance checklist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 7.2 Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 7.2.1 Definition of Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 7.2.2 Representation of Document Content with the nif:Context Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 7.3 Extension of NIF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 7.3.1 Part of Speech Tagging with OLiA . . . . . . . . 83 7.3.2 Named Entity Recognition with ITS 2.0, DBpe- dia and NERD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 7.3.3 lemon and Wiktionary2RDF . . . . . . . . . . . 86 8 nif 2.0 resources and architecture 89 8.1 NIF Core Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 8.1.1 Logical Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 8.2 Workflows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 8.2.1 Access via REST Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 8.2.2 NIF Combinator Demo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 8.3 Granularity Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 8.4 Further URI Schemes for NIF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 8.4.1 Context-Hash-based URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 9 evaluation and related work 101 9.1 Questionnaire and Developers Study for NIF 1.0 . . . . 101 9.2 Qualitative Comparison with other Frameworks and Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 9.3 URI Stability Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 9.4 Related URI Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 iv the nlp interchange format in use 109 10 use cases and applications for nif 111 10.1 Internationalization Tag Set 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 10.1.1 ITS2NIF and NIF2ITS conversion . . . . . . . . . 112 10.2 OLiA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 10.3 RDFaCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 10.4 Tiger Corpus Navigator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 10.4.1 Tools and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 10.4.2 NLP2RDF in 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 10.4.3 Linguistic Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 10.4.4 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 10.4.5 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 10.4.6 Related Work and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 10.5 OntosFeeder – a Versatile Semantic Context Provider for Web Content Authoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 10.5.1 Feature Description and User Interface Walk- through . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 10.5.2 Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 10.5.3 Embedding Metadata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 10.5.4 Related Work and Summary . . . . . . . . . . . 135 10.6 RelFinder: Revealing Relationships in RDF Knowledge Bases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 10.6.1 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 10.6.2 Disambiguation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 10.6.3 Searching for Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 10.6.4 Graph Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 10.6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 11 publication of corpora using nif 143 11.1 Wikilinks Corpus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 11.1.1 Description of the corpus . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 11.1.2 Quantitative Analysis with Google Wikilinks Cor- pus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 11.2 RDFLiveNews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 11.2.1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 11.2.2 Mapping to RDF and Publication on the Web of Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 v conclusions 149 12 lessons learned, conclusions and future work 151 12.1 Lessons Learned for NIF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 12.2 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 12.3 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15