Björn Ebbrecht


2020

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Fintan - Flexible, Integrated Transformation and Annotation eNgineering
Christian Fäth | Christian Chiarcos | Björn Ebbrecht | Maxim Ionov
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We introduce the Flexible and Integrated Transformation and Annotation eNgeneering (Fintan) platform for converting heterogeneous linguistic resources to RDF. With its modular architecture, workflow management and visualization features, Fintan facilitates the development of complex transformation pipelines by integrating generic RDF converters and augmenting them with extended graph processing capabilities: Existing converters can be easily deployed to the system by means of an ontological data structure which renders their properties and the dependencies between transformation steps. Development of subsequent graph transformation steps for resource transformation, annotation engineering or entity linking is further facilitated by a novel visual rendering of SPARQL queries. A graphical workflow manager allows to easily manage the converter modules and combine them to new transformation pipelines. Employing the stream-based graph processing approach first implemented with CoNLL-RDF, we address common challenges and scalability issues when transforming resources and showcase the performance of Fintan by means of a purely graph-based transformation of the Universal Morphology data to RDF.