Graph-based annotation engineering: towards a gold corpus for role and reference grammar

This paper describes the application of annotation engineering techniques for the construction of a corpus for Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). RRG is a semantics-oriented formalism for natural language syntax popular in comparative linguistics and linguistic typology, and predominantly applied for the description of non-European languages which are less-resourced in terms of natural language processing. Because of its cross-linguistic applicability and its conjoint treatment of syntax and semantics, RRG also represents a promising framework for research challenges within natural language processing. At the moment, however, these have not been explored as no RRG corpus data is publicly available. While RRG annotations cannot be easily derived from any single treebank in existence, we suggest that they can be reliably inferred from the intersection of syntactic and semantic annotations as represented by, for example, the Universal Dependencies (UD) and PropBank (PB), and we demonstrate this for the English Web Treebank, a 250,000 token corpus of various genres of English internet text. The resulting corpus is a gold corpus for future experiments in natural language processing in the sense that it is built on existing annotations which have been created manually. A technical challenge in this context is to align UD and PB annotations, to integrate them in a coherent manner, and to distribute and to combine their information on RRG constituent and operator projections. For this purpose, we describe a framework for flexible and scalable annotation engineering based on flexible, unconstrained graph transformations of sentence graphs by means of SPARQL Update

Spicy salmon: converting between 50+ annotation formats with Fintan, Pepper, Salt and Powla

Heterogeneity of formats, models and annotations has always been a primary hindrance for exploiting the ever increasing amount of existing linguistic resources for real world applications in and beyond NLP. Fintan - the Flexible INtegrated Transformation and Annotation eNgineering platform introduced in 2020 is designed to rapidly convert, combine and manipulate language resources both in and outside the Semantic Web by transforming it into segmented RDF representations which can be processed in parallel on a multithreaded environment and integrating it with ontologies and taxonomies. Fintan has recently been extended with a set of additional modules increasing the amount of supported non-RDF formats and the interoperability with existing non-JAVA conversion tools, and parts of this work are demonstrated in this paper. In particular, we focus on a novel recipe for resource transformation in which Fintan works in tandem with the Pepper toolset to allow computational linguists to transform their data between over 50 linguistic corpus formats with a graphical workflow manager

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

Querying a dozen corpora and a thousand years with Fintan

Large-scale diachronic corpus studies covering longer time periods are difficult if more than one corpus are to be consulted and, as a result, different formats and annotation schemas need to be processed and queried in a uniform, comparable and replicable manner. We describes the application of the Flexible Integrated Transformation and Annotation eNgineering (Fintan) platform for studying word order in German using syntactically annotated corpora that represent its entire written history. Focusing on nominal dative and accusative arguments, this study hints at two major phases in the development of scrambling in modern German. Against more recent assumptions, it supports the traditional view that word order flexibility decreased over time, but it also indicates that this was a relatively sharp transition in Early New High German. The successful case study demonstrates the potential of Fintan and the underlying LLOD technology for historical linguistics, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics. The technological contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of Fintan for querying across heterogeneously annotated corpora, as previously, it had only been applied for transformation tasks. With its focus on quantitative analysis, Fintan is a natural complement for existing multi-layer technologies that focus on query and exploration

Unifying morphology resources with OntoLex-Morph: a case study in German

The OntoLex vocabulary has become a widely used community standard for machine-readable lexical resources on the web. The primary motivation to use OntoLex in favor of tool- or application-specific formalisms is to facilitate interoperability and information integration across different resources. One of its extension that is currently being developed is a module for representing morphology, OntoLex-Morph. In this paper, we show how OntoLex-Morph can be used for the encoding and integration of different types of morphological resources on a unified basis. With German as the example, we demonstrate it for (a) a full-form dictionary with inflection information (Unimorph), (b) a dictionary of base forms and their derivations (UDer), (c) a dictionary of compounds (from GermaNet), and (d) lexicon and inflection rules of a finite-state parser/generator (SMOR/Morphisto). These data are converted to OntoLex-Morph, their linguistic information is consolidated and corresponding lexical entries are linked with each other. The main contribution of this paper is the discussion of the current state of OntoLex-Morph and its validation on different types of real-world resources for a single language. In the longer term, the successful application of OntoLex-Morph to such diverse data, along with the adjustments to the vocabulary observed in the process, will be a means to establish interoperability among morphological resources as well as between them and classical lexical data such as dictionaries, WordNets, or thesauri

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

Analyzing Middle High German syntax with RDF and SPARQL

The paper presents technological foundations for an empirical study of Middle High German (MHG) syntax. We aim to analyze the diachronic changes of MHG syntax on the example of direct and indirect object alterations in the middle field. In the absence of syntactically annotated corpora, we provide a rule-based shallow parser and an enrichment pipeline with the purpose of quantitative evaluation of a qualitative hypothesis. We provide a publicaly available enrichment and annotation pipeline grounded. A technologically innovative aspect is the application of CoNLL-RDF and SPARQL Update for parsing

Annotation interoperability for the post-ISOCat era

With this paper, we provide an overview over ISOCat successor solutions and annotation standardization efforts since 2010, and we describe the low-cost harmonization of post-ISOCat vocabularies by means of modular, linked ontologies: The CLARIN Concept Registry, LexInfo, Universal Parts of Speech, Universal Dependencies and UniMorph are linked with the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation and through it with ISOCat, the GOLD ontology, the Typological Database Systems ontology and a large number of annotation schemes

Thermal relaxation in charge ordered Pr0.63_{0.63} Ca0.37_{0.37} MnO3_3 in presence of a magnetic field

We report observation of substantial thermal relaxation in single crystal of charge ordered system Pr$_{0.63}$Ca$_{0.37}$MnO$_3$ in an applied magnetic field of H = 8T. The relaxation is observed when the temperature is scanned in presence of a magnetic field in the temperature interval $T_{MH}<T<T_{CO}$ where $T_{CO}$ is the charge ordering temperature and $T_{MH}$ is charge melting temperature in a field. In this temperature range the system has coexisting charged ordered insulator (COI) and ferromagnetic metallic (FMM) phases. No such relaxation is observed in the COI state in H = 0T or in the FMM phase at $T < T_{MH}$ in presence of a magnetic field. We conclude that the thermal relaxation is due to two coexisting phases with nearly same free energies but separated by a potential barrier. This barrier makes the transformation from one phase to the other time-dependent in the scale of the specific heat experiment and gives rise to the thermal relaxation.Comment: 4 pages LaTEX, 3 eps figure