APiCS-Ligt: Towards Semantic Enrichment of Interlinear Glossed Text

This paper presents APiCS-Ligt, an LLOD version of a collection of interlinear glossed linguistic examples from APiCS, the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures. Interlinear glossed text (IGT) plays an important role in typological and theoretical linguistic research, especially with understudied and endangered languages: It provides a way to understand linguistic phenomena without necessarily knowing the source language which is crucial for these languages since native speakers are not always easily accessible. Previously, we presented Ligt, RDF vocabulary created for representing interlinear glosses in text segments. In this paper, we present our conversion of the APiCS IGT dataset into this model and describe our efforts in linking linguistic annotations to an external ontology to add semantic representation

Ligt: An LLOD-Native Vocabulary for Representing Interlinear Glossed Text as RDF

The paper introduces Ligt, a native RDF vocabulary for representing linguistic examples as text with interlinear glosses (IGT) in a linked data formalism. Interlinear glossing is a notation used in various fields of linguistics to provide readers with a way to understand linguistic phenomena and to provide corpus data when documenting endangered languages. This data is usually provided with morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence which is not supported by any established vocabularies for representing linguistic corpora or automated annotations. Interlinear Glossed Text can be stored and exchanged in several formats specifically designed for the purpose, but these differ in their designs and concepts, and they are tied to particular tools, so the reusability of the annotated data is limited. To improve interoperability and reusability, we propose to convert such glosses to a tool-independent representation well-suited for the Web of Data, i.e., a representation in RDF. Beyond establishing structural (format) interoperability by means of a common data representation, our approach also allows using shared vocabularies and terminology repositories available from the (Linguistic) Linked Open Data cloud. We describe the core vocabulary and the converters that use this vocabulary to convert IGT in a format of various widely-used tools into RDF. Ultimately, a Linked Data representation will facilitate the accessibility of language data from less-resourced language varieties within the (Linguistic) Linked Open Data cloud, as well as enable novel ways to access and integrate this information with (L)LOD dictionary data and other types of lexical-semantic resources. In a longer perspective, data currently only available through these formats will become more visible and reusable and contribute to the development of a truly multilingual (semantic) web

Ligt: an LLOD-native vcocabulary for representing interlinear glossed text as RDF

The paper introduces Ligt, a native RDF vocabulary for representing linguistic examples as text with interlinear glosses (IGT) in a linked data formalism. Interlinear glossing is a notation used in various fields of linguistics to provide readers with a way to understand linguistic phenomena and to provide corpus data when documenting endangered languages. This data is usually provided with morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence which is not supported by any established vocabularies for representing linguistic corpora or automated annotations. Interlinear Glossed Text can be stored and exchanged in several formats specifically designed for the purpose, but these differ in their designs and concepts, and they are tied to particular tools, so the reusability of the annotated data is limited. To improve interoperability and reusability, we propose to convert such glosses to a tool-independent representation well-suited for the Web of Data, i.e., a representation in RDF. Beyond establishing structural (format) interoperability by means of a common data representation, our approach also allows using shared vocabularies and terminology repositories available from the (Linguistic) Linked Open Data cloud. We describe the core vocabulary and the converters that use this vocabulary to convert IGT in a format of various widely-used tools into RDF. Ultimately, a Linked Data representation will facilitate the accessibility of language data from less-resourced language varieties within the (Linguistic) Linked Open Data cloud, as well as enable novel ways to access and integrate this information with (L)LOD dictionary data and other types of lexical-semantic resources. In a longer perspective, data currently only available through these formats will become more visible and reusable and contribute to the development of a truly multilingual (semantic) web

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

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

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

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