The ACoLi dictionary graph

In this paper, we report the release of the ACoLi Dictionary Graph, a large-scale collection of multilingual open source dictionaries available in two machine-readable formats, a graph representation in RDF, using the OntoLex-Lemon vocabulary, and a simple tabular data format to facilitate their use in NLP tasks, such as translation inference across dictionaries. We describe the mapping and harmonization of the underlying data structures into a unified representation, its serialization in RDF and TSV, and the release of a massive and coherent amount of lexical data under open licenses

Linking discourse marker inventories

The paper describes the first comprehensive edition of machine-readable discourse marker lexicons. Discourse markers such as and, because, but, though or thereafter are essential communicative signals in human conversation, as they indicate how an utterance relates to its communicative context. As much of this information is implicit or expressed differently in different languages, discourse parsing, context-adequate natural language generation and machine translation are considered particularly challenging aspects of Natural Language Processing. Providing this data in machine-readable, standard-compliant form will thus facilitate such technical tasks, and moreover, allow to explore techniques for translation inference to be applied to this particular group of lexical resources that was previously largely neglected in the context of Linguistic Linked (Open) Data

Linking Discourse Marker Inventories

The paper describes the first comprehensive edition of machine-readable discourse marker lexicons. Discourse markers such as and, because, but, though or thereafter are essential communicative signals in human conversation, as they indicate how an utterance relates to its communicative context. As much of this information is implicit or expressed differently in different languages, discourse parsing, context-adequate natural language generation and machine translation are considered particularly challenging aspects of Natural Language Processing. Providing this data in machine-readable, standard-compliant form will thus facilitate such technical tasks, and moreover, allow to explore techniques for translation inference to be applied to this particular group of lexical resources that was previously largely neglected in the context of Linguistic Linked (Open) Data

Translation inference by concept propagation

This paper describes our contribution to the Third Shared Task on Translation Inference across Dictionaries (TIAD-2020). We describe an approach on translation inference based on symbolic methods, the propagation of concepts over a graph of interconnected dictionaries: Given a mapping from source language words to lexical concepts (e.g., synsets) as a seed, we use bilingual dictionaries to extrapolate a mapping of pivot and target language words to these lexical concepts. Translation inference is then performed by looking up the lexical concept(s) of a source language word and returning the target language word(s) for which these lexical concepts have the respective highest score. We present two instantiations of this system: One using WordNet synsets as concepts, and one using lexical entries (translations) as concepts. With a threshold of 0, the latter configuration is the second among participant systems in terms of F1 score. We also describe additional evaluation experiments on Apertium data, a comparison with an earlier approach based on embedding projection, and an approach for constrained projection that outperforms the TIAD-2020 vanilla system by a large margin

Translation inference through multi-lingual word embedding similarity

This paper describes our contribution to the Shared Task on Translation Inference across Dictionaries (TIAD-2019). In our approach, we construct a multi-lingual word embedding space by projecting new languages in the feature space of a language for which a pretrained embedding model exists. We use the similarity of the word embeddings to predict candidate translations. Even if our projection methodology is rather simplistic, our system outperforms the other participating systems with respect to the F1 measure for the language pairs which we predicted

The ACoLi CoNLL libraries: beyond tab-separated values

We introduce the ACoLi CoNLL libraries, a set of Java archives to facilitate advanced manipulations of corpora annotated in TSV formats, including all members of the CoNLL format family. In particular, we provide means for (i) rule-based re-write operations, (ii) visualization and manual annotation, (iii) merging CoNLL files, and (iv) data base support. The ACoLi CoNLL libraries provide command-line interface to these functionalities. The following aspects are technologically innovative and exceed beyond the state of the art: We support every OWPL (one word per line) corpus format with tab-separated columns, whereas most existing tools are specific to one particular CoNLL dialect. We employ established W3C standards for rule-based graph rewriting operations on CoNLL sentences. We provide means for the heuristic, but fully automated merging of CoNLL annotations of the same textual content, in particular for resolving conflicting tokenizations. We demonstrate the usefulness and practicability of our proposed CoNLL libraries on well-established data sets of the Universal Dependency corpus and the Penn Treebank

Inducing discourse marker inventories from lexical knowledge graphs

Discourse marker inventories are important tools for the development of both discourse parsers and corpora with discourse annotations. In this paper we explore the potential of massively multilingual lexical knowledge graphs to induce multilingual discourse marker lexicons using concept propagation methods as previously developed in the context of translation inference across dictionaries. Given one or multiple source languages with discourse marker inventories that discourse relations as senses of potential discourse markers, as well as a large number of bilingual dictionaries that link them – directly or indirectly – with the target language, we specifically study to what extent discourse marker induction can benefit from the integration of information from different sources, the impact of sense granularity and what limiting factors may need to be considered. Our study uses discourse marker inventories from nine European languages normalized against the discourse relation inventory of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), as well as three collections of machine-readable dictionaries with different characteristics, so that the interplay of a large number of factors can be studied

Get! Mimetypes! Right! (Crazy new idea)

This paper identifies three technical requirements - availability of data, sustainable hosting and resolvable URIs for hosted data - as minimal pre-conditions for Linguistic Linked Open Data technology to develop towards a mature technological ecosystem that third party applications can build upon. While a critical amount of data is available (and it continues to grow), there does not seem to exist a hosting solution that combines the prospects of long-term availability with an unrestricted capability to support resolvable URIs. In particular, data hosting services do currently not allow data to be declared as RDF content by means of their media type (mime type), so that the capability of clients to recognize formats and to resolve URIs on that basis is severely limited

When linguistics meets web technologies. Recent advances in modelling linguistic linked data

This article provides an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of models (including vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies) used for representing linguistic linked data (LLD). It focuses on the latest developments in the area and both builds upon and complements previous works covering similar territory. The article begins with an overview of recent trends which have had an impact on linked data models and vocabularies, such as the growing influence of the FAIR guidelines, the funding of several major projects in which LLD is a key component, and the increasing importance of the relationship of the digital humanities with LLD. Next, we give an overview of some of the most well known vocabularies and models in LLD. After this we look at some of the latest developments in community standards and initiatives such as OntoLex-Lemon as well as recent work which has been in carried out in corpora and annotation and LLD including a discussion of the LLD metadata vocabularies META-SHARE and lime and language identifiers. In the following part of the paper we look at work which has been realised in a number of recent projects and which has a significant impact on LLD vocabularies and models