The Open Linguistics Working Group, in conjunction with the W3C OntoLex Community Group, is organizing the Third Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2014), in co-location with Language Resource and Evaluation Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland on the 27th of May 2014.  LDL-2014 is also supported by two recently started EU Projects: LIDER (Linked Data as an enabler of cross-media and multilingual content analytics for enterprises across Europe), which aims to provide an ecosystem for the establishment of linguistic linked open data, as well as media resources metadata, for a free and open exploitation of such resources in multilingual, cross-media content analytics across Europe. Secondly,  QTLeap (Quality Translation with Deep Language Engineering Approaches), which explores novel ways for attaining machine translation of higher quality that are opened by a new generation of increasingly sophisticated semantic datasets (including Linked Open Data) and by recent advances in deep language processing.

The goal of the workshop is twofold. First, we will assemble researchers from various fields of linguistics, natural language processing, knowledge management and information technology to present and discuss principles, case studies, and best practices for representing, publishing and linking mono- and multilingual linguistic and knowledge data collections, including corpora, grammars, dictionaries, wordnets, translation memories, domain specific ontologies etc. In particular, we will discuss the application of the Linked Open Data paradigm to linguistic data as it might provide an important step towards making linguistic data: i) easily and uniformly queryable, ii) interoperable and iii) sharable over the Web using open standards such as the HTTP protocol and the RDF data model [1].

Secondly, we will provide researchers on natural language processing and semantic web technologies a platform to present case studies and best practices on the exploitation of linguistic resources exposed on the Web for Natural Language Processing applications, or other content-centered applications such as content analytics, knowledge extraction, etc. The availability of massive linked open knowledge resources raises the question how such data can be suitably employed to facilitate different NLP tasks and research questions. This workshop will also present several contributions to the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud [2], in particular, contributions that demonstrate an added value resulting from the combination of linked datasets and ontologies as a source for semantic information with linguistic resources published according to as linked data principles. Another important question that will be addressed in the workshop is how Natural Language Processing techniques can be employed to further facilitate the growth and enrichment of linguistic resources on the Web.

Data Liberation Campaign

Recently META-NET, an extensive network of excellence in Language Technologies, conducted an internal survey to find out about the existence and availability of national corpora (or similar) for the various European languages covered by the network. The results of this small study showed that for almost every European language there exists some reference corpus of an established quality and in many cases produced or otherwise endorsed by the respective official language body. However, despite these corpora existing and being held by national organisations in the majority of cases, it is not possible for language technology researchers to get access to these corpora for their own work. For example, it is not possible for researchers to download or to run their own analysis over the data.
In most cases the reasons cited for these restrictions are copyright and redistribution restrictions that the corpus owners or corpus compilers have with publishers who provided the source data. These restrictions prevent researchers from using the data for non profit purposes such as scientific research which can benefit the entire language and language technology community. This is a striking finding in the wake of the recent publication of the Languages in the Digital Age series which highlighted that a lack of resources or a lack of availability of resources is putting many European languages at risk in the digital age.

In response to these findings, META-NET have prepared an open letter to all the official language bodies in Europe and to those holding onto the various corpora calling on them to consider trying to make this important language data available for research purposes. The open letter is also addressed to the European Patent Office. In this letter META-NET ask for those with the power to do so to reconsider their distribution policies to allow greater access to their data for research. They also offer to provide a safe and secure mechanism (META-SHARE) to share the data should they choose to do so, and also any additional help their legal team can provide regarding licensing, copyright and other legal issues.

The open letter, including a recipient list, is reproduced below. If you feel that there is a huge benefit to liberating these corpora and making them available for research then please contact your local language body and let them know that you are in favour of the META-NET proposal.

META-NET-Open-Letter

We are pleased to announce the release of UBY 1.0 –

a large-scale lexical-semantic resource for natural language processing (NLP)
based on the ISO standard Lexical Markup Framework (LMF), see UBY website.

UBY combines a wide range of information from expert-constructed and collaboratively constructed resources for English and German.

Currently, UBY holds structurally and semantically interoperable versions of nine resources in two languages:

• English WordNet, Wiktionary, Wikipedia, FrameNet and VerbNet,
• German Wikipedia, Wiktionary and GermaNet, and multilingual OmegaWiki.

A subset of these resources is linked at the word sense level.
There are monolingual sense alignments between VerbNet–FrameNet and VerbNet–WordNet as well as between WordNet–Wikipedia and WordNet–Wiktionary.
In addition, UBY provides cross-lingual sense alignments between WordNet and German OmegaWiki,
also including the inter-language links given in Wikipedia and OmegaWiki.

All resources in UBY are represented according to our LMF lexicon model, UBY-LMF.
UBY-LMF captures lexical information at a fine-grained level by employing a large number of Data Categories from  ISOCat.

 

Highlights of UBY:

• The union of a wide range of heterogeneous resources in a single, standardized resource.
• The linking at the word sense level between a subset of the resources.

UBY is complemented by a Java API, the UBY-API, and conversion tools (e.g., for converting the resources to UBY-LMF).
The UBY API and conversion tools are available at Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/uby/

Highlights of the UBY-API:

• Unified access to the various information types in the nine resources.
• Easy cross-resource access to the various information types in the resources.

A tutorial showing the use of the UBY-API can be found at

http://code.google.com/p/uby/wiki/ApiTutorial

A Web Interface for exploring and visualizing UBY is currently being developed and will soon be available
at the UBY website.

 

This project was initiated under the auspices of Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych, Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP), Technische Universität Darmstadt.
We are grateful for the generous financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation and the German Research Foundation.

Please direct any questions or suggestions to uby-users@googlegroups.com

The Open Linguistics Working Group is organizing a workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics, March 7 – 9, 2012, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, as part of the 34th Annual Meeting of German Linguistics Society (DGfS).

The explosion of information technology has led to a substantial growth in quantity, diversity and complexity of web-accessible linguistic data. These resources become even more useful when linked. This workshop will present principles, use cases, and best practices for using the linked data paradigm to represent, exploit, store, and connect different types of linguistic data collections.

We are glad to welcome researchers from the fields of language documentation, typology, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, as well as researchers from other empirically-oriented disciplines of linguistics who share an interest in data and metadata modelling with Semantic Web technologies such as RDF or OWL.
Aside from numerous presentations from such diverse fields of linguistics, information technology and neighboring disciplines, we are happy to announce two invited speakers, Nancy Ide (Vassar College), and Martin Haspelmath (Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig).

We’re very much looking forward to welcome you in Frankfurt. For anyone who cannot attend we made the proceedings available online.
Please see the LDL-2012 website for detailed information on program, venue, and registration. The workshop will have both online proceedings and a printed companion volume. The online proceedings are available from the Workshop page.

The workshop will be held on June 30th, 17:30 in Workshop II during the OKCon 2011.

To read up on the current status of the Open Linguistic Group see this blog post.

At the beginning there will be 6 presentations:

• Dennis Spohr– Linking lexical resources and ontologies on the Semantic Web with lemon – Slides – There are a large number of ontologies currently available on the Semantic Web. However, in order to exploit them within natural language processing applications, more linguistic information than can be represented in current Semantic Web standards is required. Further, there are a large number of lexical resources available representing a wealth of linguistic information, but this data exists in various formats and is difficult to link to ontologies and other resources. We present a model we call lemon (Lexicon Model for Ontologies) that supports the sharing of terminological and lexicon resources on the Semantic Web as well as their linking to the existing semantic representations provided by ontologies. We demonstrate that lemon can succinctly represent existing lexical resources and in combination with standard NLP tools we can easily generate new lexica for domain ontologies according to the lemon model. We demonstrate that by combining generated and existing lexica we can collaboratively develop rich lexical descriptions of ontology entities. We also show that the adoption of Semantic Web standards can provide added value for lexicon models by supporting a rich axiomatization of linguistic categories that can be used to constrain the usage of the model and to perform consistency checks.
• Ernesto William De Luca – Multilingual Lexical Linked Data – A lot of information that is already available on the Web, or retrieved from local information systems and social networks is structured in data silos that are not semantically related. Semantic technologies make it emerge that the use of typed links that directly express their relations are an advantage for every application that can reuse the incorporated knowledge about the data. In this presentation, we present our work of providing Lexical Linked Data (LLD) through a meta-model that contains all the resources and gives the possibility to retrieve and navigate them from different perspectives. We show some use cases where we link lexical data, and show how to reuse and inference semantic data derived from lexical data.
• Christian Chiarcos – Modelling linguistic corpora and their annotations with OWL/DL – Slides
• Sebastian Nordhoff – The Glottolog/Langdoc Project: Publishing a bibliographical database of 200,000 references for 7,000 languages as Linked Data – Slides
• Sebastian Hellmann – NIF: NLP Interchange Format – Slides
• Richard Littauer – Towards Open Methods: Using Scientific Workflows in Linguistics – Slides

The second part will consist of a mixture of an Open Panel and a Q&A session. At any time people can come to the front and make a statement and then we will discuss it, topics include and are not limited to:

• Incentives for publishing data: Requirement analysis for a Scientific Journal as a forum for publishing data
• Best practices for publishing Open Linguistic Data

If you have any questions, or if you’re interested in keeping in touch, please write to the [open-linguistics mailing list](https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-linguistics)!