See you in Beijing!

4th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics (LDL-2015): Resources and Applications
Beijing, June 31st, 2015, http://ldl2015.linguistic-lod.org, collocated with ACL-IJCNLP 2015

Workshop Description

The substantial growth in the quantity, diversity and complexity of linguistic data accessible on the Web has led to many new and interesting research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and linguistics. However, resource interoperability represents a major challenge that still needs to be addressed, in particular if information from different sources is combined. With its fourth instantiation, the Linked Data in Linguistics workshop continues to provide a major forum to discuss the creation of linguistic resources on the web using linked data principles, as well as issues of interoperability, distribution protocols, access and integration of language resources and natural language processing pipelines developed on this basis.

As a result of the preceding workshops, a considerable number of resources is now available in the Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) cloud [1]. LDL-2015 will thus specifically welcome papers addressing the usage aspect of Linked Data and related technologies in NLP, linguistics and neighboring fields, such as Digital Humanities.

Organized by the interdisciplinary Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) [2], the LDL workshop series is open to researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including (computational) linguistics and NLP, but also the Semantic Web, linguistic typology, corpus linguistics, terminology and lexicography. In 2015, we plan to increase the involvement of the LIDER project [3] and the W3C Community Group on Linked Data for Language Technology (LD4LT) [4], to build on their efforts to facilitate the use of linked data and language resources for commercial applications, and to continue the success of LIDER‘s roadmapping workshop series in engagement with enterprise.

[1] http://linguistics.okfn.org/resources/llod/
[2] http://linguistics.okfn.org/
[3] http://www.lider-project.eu/
[4] http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt/

Topics of Interest

We invite presentations of algorithms, methodologies, experiments, use cases, project proposals and position papers regarding the creation, publication or application of linguistic data collections and their linking with other resources, as well as descriptions of such data. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

A. Resources

• Modelling linguistic data and metadata with OWL and/or RDF.
• Ontologies for linguistic data and metadata collections as well as cross-lingual retrieval.
• Descriptions of data sets following Linked Data principles.
• Legal and social aspects of Linguistic Linked Open Data.
• Best practices for the publication and linking of multilingual knowledge resources.

B. Applications

• Applications of such data, other ontologies or linked data from any subdiscipline of linguistics or NLP.
• The role of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data to address challenges of multilinguality and interoperability.
• Application and applicability of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data for knowledge extraction, machine translation and other NLP tasks.
• NLP contributions to (Linguistic) Linked Open Data.

We invite both long (8 pages and 2 pages of references, formatted according to the ACL-IJCNLP guidelines) and short papers (4 pages and 2 pages of references) representing original research, innovative approaches and resource types, use cases or in-depth discussions. Short papers may also represent project proposals, work in progress or data set descriptions.

Dataset Description Papers

In addition to full papers and regular short papers, authors may submit short papers with a dataset descriptions describing a resource’s availability, published location and key statistics (such as size). Such papers do not need to show a novel method for the creation or publishing of the data but *instead* will be judged on the quality, usefulness and clarity of description given in the paper.

For contact information, submission details and last-minute updates, please consult our website under http://ldl2015.linguistic-lod.org

Important Dates

• May 8th, 2015: Paper submission
• June 5th, 2015: Notification of Acceptance
• June 21st, 2015: Camera-Ready Copy
• June 31st, 2015: Workshop

Organizing Committee

• Christian Chiarcos (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)
• Philipp Cimiano (Bielefeld University, Germany)
• Nancy Ide (Vassar College, USA)
• John P. McCrae (Bielefeld University, Germany)
• Petya Osenova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)

Program Committee

• Eneko Agirre (University of the Basque Country, Spain)
• Guadalupe Aguado (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
• Claire Bonial (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)
• Peter Bouda (Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation, Portugal)
• Antonio Branco (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
• Martin Brümmer (University of Leipzig, Germany)
• Paul Buitelaar (INSIGHT, NUIG Galway, Ireland)
• Steve Cassidy (Macquarie University, Australia)
• Nicoletta Calzolari (ILC-CNR, Italy)
• Thierry Declerck (DFKI, Germany)
• Ernesto William De Luca (University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany)
• Gerard de Melo (University of California at Berkeley)
• Judith Eckle-Kohler (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)
• Francesca Frontini (ILC-CNR, Italy)
• Jeff Good (University at Buffalo)
• Asunción Gómez Pérez (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
• Jorge Gracia (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
• Yoshihiko Hayashi (Waseda University, Japan)
• Fahad Khan (ILC-CNR, Italy)
• Seiji Koide (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
• Lutz Maicher (Universität Leipzig, Germany)
• Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
• Steven Moran (Universität Zürich, Switzerland)
• Sebastian Nordhoff (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany)
• Antonio Pareja-Lora (Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain)
• Maciej Piasecki (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
• Francesca Quattri (Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
• Laurent Romary (INRIA, France)
• Felix Sasaki (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Germany)
• Andrea Schalley (Griffith University, Australia)
• Gilles Sérraset (Joseph Fourier University, France)
• Kiril Simov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria)
• Milena Slavcheva (JRC-Brussels, Belgium)
• Armando Stellato (University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Italy)
• Marco Tadic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
• Marieke van Erp (VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Daniel Vila (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
• Cristina Vertan (University of Hamburg, Germany)
• Walther v. Hahn (University of Hamburg, Germany)
• Menzo Windhouwer (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)

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

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.

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)!

Since its formation last year, the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) has been steadily growing and the direction the working group is heading has been clarified (although a number of issues remain open). In the last months, we concentrated on the identification of goals and directions for this working group to pursue, and in this blog post, we summarize results of this process, about its current status as well as the main challenges and problems we have identified so far.

An important result of our discussion are the seven points described in the next section, which define the purpose of the working group.  In the next section, we summarize four major problems and challenges of the work with linguistic data. Such problems will become a primary topic of the Working Group. Thereafter, we give an overview of the current status and activities of the group and provide some suggestions for how to get involved.