Informationsinfrastrukturen am Institut für Deutsche Sprache

This paper describes the effort of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), the central research institution for the German language, connected with Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Use of ICT in a language research institute is twofold. On the one hand, ICT provides basic services for researches to accomplish their daily work. On the other hand, several national and international institutions have a strong interest in ICT. Therefore, ICT can also be seen as an amplifier for language research. The first part of this paper reports on the activates of the IDS in internal and external ICT-related projects and initiatives. The second part describes a general strategy towards an ICT strategy that could be useful both for the IDS and other national language institutes. We think such a general strategy is necessary to create a strong foundation not only for the ICT-related projects, but as a basis for a modem research institute

A standards-related web-based information system

This late breaking proposal introduces the prototype of a web-based information system dealing with standards in the field of annotation

On the Lossless Transformation of Single-File, Multi-Layer Annotations into Multi-Rooted Trees

The Generalised Architecture for Sustainability (GENAU) provides a framework for the transformation of single-file, multi-layer annotations into multi-rooted trees. By employing constraints expressed in XCONCUR-CL, this procedure can be performed lossless, i.e., without losing information, especially with regard to the nesting of elements that belong to multiple annotation layers. This article describes how different types of linguistic corpora can be transformed using specialised tools, and how constraint rules can be applied to the resulting multi-rooted trees to add an additional level of validation

Plataforma web para el mantenimiento, exploración, visulización y búsqueda en corpus lingüísticos y en otros recursos

Presentamos SPLICR, una plataforma de sostenibilidad para corpus y recursos lingüísticos basada en web. El sistema está destinado a personas que trabajan en el campo de la lingüística o de la lingüística computacional. Consiste en una base de datos extensa para metadatos que puede ser explorada para buscar recursos lingüísticos, que pudieran ser apropiados para las necesidades específicas de una investigación. SPLICR también ofrece una interfaz gráfica, que permite a los usuarios buscar y visualizar los corpus. El proyecto, en el que se ha desarollado el sistema, aspira a archivar de modo sostenible aproximadamente sesenta recursos lingüísticos, que han sido construidos mediante la colaboración de tres centros de investigación. Nuestro proyecto tiene dos metas principales: (a) Procesar y archivar recursos de forma sostenible, de manera que los recursos sigan siendo accesibles para la comunidad científica dentro de cinco, diez, o incluso veinte años. (b) El permitir a los investigadores buscar en los recursos tanto a nivel de metadatos como a nivel de anotaciones lingüísticas. En términos más generales, nuestro objetivo es proporcionar soluciones que posibiliten la interoperabilidad, reutilización y sostenibilidad de compilaciones heterogéneas de recursos de lenguaje.We present SPLICR, the Web-based Sustainability Platform for Linguistic Corpora and Resources. The system is aimed at people who work in Linguistics or Computational Linguistics: a comprehensive database of metadata records can be explored in order to find language resources that could be appropriate for one’s specific research needs. SPLICR also provides a graphical interface that enables users to query and to visualise corpora. The project in which the system is developed aims at sustainably archiving the ca. 60 language resources that have been constructed in three collaborative research centres. Our project has two primary goals: (a) To process and to archive sustainably the resources so that they are still available to the research community in five, ten, or even 20 years time. (b) To enable researchers to query the resources both on the level of their metadata as well as on the level of linguistic annotations. In more general terms, our goal is to enable solutions that leverage the interoperability, reusability, and sustainability of heterogeneous collections of language resources

The New IDS Corpus Analysis Platform: Challenges and Prospects

The present article describes the first stage of the KorAP project, launched recently at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany. The aim of this project is to develop an innovative corpus analysis platform to tackle the increasing demands of modern linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse primary data and annotations in the petabyte range, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary linguistic data, and thus fully satisfying the demands of a scientific tool. An additional important aim of the project is to make corpus data as openly accessible as possible in light of unavoidable legal restrictions, for instance through support for distributed virtual corpora, user-defined annotations and adaptable user interfaces, as well as interfaces and sandboxes for user-supplied analysis applications. We discuss our motivation for undertaking this endeavour and the challenges that face it. Next, we outline our software implementation plan and describe development to-date

The Meta-data-Database of a Next Generation Sustainability Web-Platform for Language Resources

Our goal is to provide a web-based platform for the long-term preservation and distribution of a heterogeneous collection of linguistic resources. We discuss the corpus preprocessing and normalisation phase that results in sets of multi-rooted trees. At the same time we transform the original metadata records, just like the corpora annotated using different annotation approaches and exhibiting different levels of granularity, into the all-encompassing and highly flexible format eTEI for which we present editing and parsing tools. We also discuss the architecture of the sustainability platform. Its primary components are an XML database that contains corpus and metadata files and an SQL database that contains user accounts and access control lists. A staging area, whose structure, contents, and consistency can be checked using tools, is used to make sure that new resources about to be imported into the platform have the correct structure

Towards validation of concurrent markup

XCONCUR allows for the annotations of multiple concurrent hierarchies, but lacks cross-layer validation. This paper explores the requirements for a constraint-based approach for such a validation process

Making CONCUR work

The SGML feature CONCUR allowed for a document to be simultaneously marked up in multiple conflicting hierarchical tagsets but validated and interpreted in one tagset at a time. Alas, CONCUR was rarely implemented, and XML does not address the problem of conflicting hierarchies at all. The MuLaX document syntax is a non-XML syntax that enables multiply-encoded hierarchies by distinguishing different “layers” in the hierarchy by adding a layer ID as a prefix to the element names. The IDs tie all the elements in a single hierarchy together in an “annotation layer”. Extraction of a single annotation layer results in a well-formed XML document, and each annotation layer may be associated with an XML schema. The MuLaX processing model works on the nodes of one annotation layer at a time through Xpath-like navigation. CONCUR lives