Many of the world’s languages are left behind when it comes to Language Technology applications, since most of these are available only in a limited number of languages, creating a digital divide that affects millions of users worldwide. It is crucial, therefore, to monitor and quantify the progress of technology support for individual languages, which also enables comparisons across language communities. In this way, efforts can be directed towards reducing language barriers, promoting economic and social inclusion, and ensuring that all citizens can use their preferred language in the digital age. This paper critically reviews and compares recent quantitative approaches to measuring technology support for languages. Despite using different approaches and methodologies, the findings of all analysed papers demonstrate the unequal distribution of technology support and emphasise the existence of a digital divide among languages.
This article provides a thorough mapping of NLP and Language Technology research on 39 European languages onto 46 domains. Our analysis is based on almost 50,000 papers published between 2010 and October 2022 in the ACL Anthology. We use a dictionary-based approach to identify 1) languages, 2) domains, and 3) NLP tasks in these papers; the dictionary-based method using exact terms has a precision value of 0.81. Moreover, we identify common mistakes which can be useful to fine-tune the methodology for future work. While we are only able to highlight selected results in this submitted version, the final paper will contain detailed analyses and charts on a per-language basis. We hope that this study can contribute to digital language equality in Europe by providing information to the academic and industrial research community about the opportunities for novel LT/NLP research.
We present and describe two language resources in this paper: CATalog 1.0, the largest text corpus in Catalan to date, and CURATE (Corpus Utility for RAting TExt), a modular, parallelizable pipeline used for processing and scoring documents based on text quality that we have optimised to run in High Performance Cluster (HPC) environments. In the coming sections we describe our data preprocessing pipeline at length; traditional pipelines usually implement a set of binary filters such that a given document is either in or out. In our experience with Catalan, in lower-resource settings it is more practical to instead assign a document a soft score to allow for more flexible decision-making. We describe how the document score is calculated and highlight its interpretability by showing that it is significantly correlated with human judgements as obtained from a comparative judgement experiment. We additionally describe the different subcorpora that make up CATalog 1.0.
The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is an integral part of the EU data strategy, which aims at developing a single market for data. Its decentralised technical infrastructure and governance scheme are currently being developed by the LDS project, which also has dedicated tasks for proof-of-concept prototypes, handling legal aspects, raising awareness and promoting the LDS through events and social media channels. The LDS is part of a broader vision for establishing all necessary components to develop European large language models.
The European Language Grid (ELG) is a cloud platform for the whole European Language Technology community. While the EU project that developed the platform successfully concluded in June 2022, the ELG initiative has continued. This article provides a description of the current state of ELG in terms of user adoption and number of language resources and technologies available in early 2024. It also provides an overview of the various activities with regard to ELG since the end of the project and since the publication of the ELG book, especially the co-authors’ attempt to integrate the ELG platform into various data space initiatives. The article also provides an overview of the Digital Language Equality (DLE) dashboard and the current state of DLE in Europe.
The steep increase in the number of scholarly publications has given rise to various digital repositories, libraries and knowledge graphs aimed to capture, manage, and preserve scientific data. Efficiently navigating such databases requires a system able to classify scholarly documents according to the respective research (sub-)field. However, not every digital repository possesses a relevant classification schema for categorising publications. For instance, one of the largest digital archives in Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the ACL Anthology, lacks a system for classifying papers into topics and sub-topics. This paper addresses this gap by constructing a corpus of 1,500 ACL Anthology publications annotated with their main contributions using a novel hierarchical taxonomy of core CL/NLP topics and sub-topics. The corpus is used in a shared task with the goal of classifying CL/NLP papers into their respective sub-topics.
In the realm of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, there is a need for high-quality annotated data to train and evaluate supervised models. An extensive number of annotation tools have been developed to facilitate the data labelling process. However, finding the right tool is a demanding task involving thorough searching and testing. Hence, to effectively navigate the multitude of tools, it becomes essential to ensure their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). This survey addresses the FAIRness of existing annotation software by evaluating 50 different tools against the FAIR principles for research software (FAIR4RS). The study indicates that while being accessible and interoperable, annotation tools are difficult to find and reuse. In addition, there is a need to establish community standards for annotation software development, documentation, and distribution.
This paper provides an overview of the ongoing European Language Equality(ELE) project, an 18-month action funded by the European Commission which involves 52 partners. The primary goal of ELE is to prepare the European Language Equality Programme, in the form of a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda and a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality (DLE) in Europe by 2030.
Transformer-based language models usually treat texts as linear sequences. However, most texts also have an inherent hierarchical structure, i.e., parts of a text can be identified using their position in this hierarchy. In addition, section titles usually indicate the common topic of their respective sentences. We propose a novel approach to formulate, extract, encode and inject hierarchical structure information explicitly into an extractive summarization model based on a pre-trained, encoder-only Transformer language model (HiStruct+ model), which improves SOTA ROUGEs for extractive summarization on PubMed and arXiv substantially. Using various experimental settings on three datasets (i.e., CNN/DailyMail, PubMed and arXiv), our HiStruct+ model outperforms a strong baseline collectively, which differs from our model only in that the hierarchical structure information is not injected. It is also observed that the more conspicuous hierarchical structure the dataset has, the larger improvements our method gains. The ablation study demonstrates that the hierarchical position information is the main contributor to our model’s SOTA performance.
This paper introduces the concept of Digital Language Equality (DLE) developed by the EU-funded European Language Equality (ELE) project, and describes the associated DLE Metric with a focus on its technological factors (TFs), which are complemented by situational contextual factors. This work aims at objectively describing the level of technological support of all European languages and lays the foundation to implement a large-scale EU-wide programme to ensure that these languages can continue to exist and prosper in the digital age, to serve the present and future needs of their speakers. The paper situates this ongoing work with a strong European focus in the broader context of related efforts, and explains how the DLE Metric can help track the progress towards DLE for all languages of Europe, focusing in particular on the role played by the TFs. These are derived from the European Language Grid (ELG) Catalogue, that provides the empirical basis to measure the level of digital readiness of all European languages. The DLE Metric scores can be consulted through an online interactive dashboard to show the level of technological support of each European language and track the overall progress toward DLE.
In our digital age, digital language equality is an important goal to enable participation in society for all citizens, independent of the language they speak. To assess the current state of play with regard to Europe’s languages, we developed, in the project European Language Equality, a metric for digital language equality that consists of two parts, technological and contextual (i.e., non-technological) factors. We present a metric for calculating the contextual factors for over 80 European languages. For each language, a score is calculated that reflects the broader context or socio-economic ecosystem of a language, which has, for a given language, a direct impact for technology and resource development; it is important to note, though, that Language Technologies and Resources related aspects are reflected by the technological factors. To reduce the vast number of potential contextual factors to an adequate number, five different configurations were calculated and evaluated with a panel of experts. The best results were achieved by a configuration in which 12 manually curated factors were included. In the factor selection process, attention was paid to data quality, automatic updatability, inclusion of data from different domains, and a balance between different data types. The evaluation shows that this specific configuration is stable for the official EU languages; while for regional and minority languages, as well as national non-official EU languages, there is room for improvement.
Learning scientific document representations can be substantially improved through contrastive learning objectives, where the challenge lies in creating positive and negative training samples that encode the desired similarity semantics. Prior work relies on discrete citation relations to generate contrast samples. However, discrete citations enforce a hard cut-off to similarity. This is counter-intuitive to similarity-based learning and ignores that scientific papers can be very similar despite lacking a direct citation - a core problem of finding related research. Instead, we use controlled nearest neighbor sampling over citation graph embeddings for contrastive learning. This control allows us to learn continuous similarity, to sample hard-to-learn negatives and positives, and also to avoid collisions between negative and positive samples by controlling the sampling margin between them. The resulting method SciNCL outperforms the state-of-the-art on the SciDocs benchmark. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it can train (or tune) language models sample-efficiently and that it can be combined with recent training-efficient methods. Perhaps surprisingly, even training a general-domain language model this way outperforms baselines pretrained in-domain.
To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, many jurisdictions have introduced new or altered existing legislation. Even though these new rules are often communicated to the public in news articles, it remains challenging for laypersons to learn about what is currently allowed or forbidden since news articles typically do not reference underlying laws. We investigate an automated approach to extract legal claims from news articles and to match the claims with their corresponding applicable laws. We examine the feasibility of the two tasks concerning claims about COVID-19-related laws from Berlin, Germany. For both tasks, we create and make publicly available the data sets and report the results of initial experiments. We obtain promising results with Transformer-based models that achieve 46.7 F1 for claim extraction and 91.4 F1 for law matching, albeit with some conceptual limitations. Furthermore, we discuss challenges of current machine learning approaches for legal language processing and their ability for complex legal reasoning tasks.
We present an extension of the SynSemClass Event-type Ontology, originally conceived as a bilingual Czech-English resource. We added German entries to the classes representing the concepts of the ontology. Having a different starting point than the original work (unannotated parallel corpus without links to a valency lexicon and, of course, different existing lexical resources), it was a challenge to adapt the annotation guidelines, the data model and the tools used for the original version. We describe the process and results of working in such a setup. We also show the next steps to adapt the annotation process, data structures and formats and tools necessary to make the addition of a new language in the future more smooth and efficient, and possibly to allow for various teams to work on SynSemClass extensions to many languages concurrently. We also present the latest release which contains the results of adding German, freely available for download as well as for online access.
Almost all summarisation methods and datasets focus on a single language and short summaries. We introduce a new dataset called WikinewsSum for English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Italian summarisation tailored for extended summaries of approx. 11 sentences. The dataset comprises 39,626 summaries which are news articles from Wikinews and their sources. We compare three multilingual transformer models on the extractive summarisation task and three training scenarios on which we fine-tune mT5 to perform abstractive summarisation. This results in strong baselines for both extractive and abstractive summarisation on WikinewsSum. We also show how the combination of an extractive model with an abstractive one can be used to create extended abstractive summaries from long input documents. Finally, our results show that fine-tuning mT5 on all the languages combined significantly improves the summarisation performance on low-resource languages.
We present a dataset consisting of German offensive and non-offensive tweets, annotated for speech acts. These 600 tweets are a subset of the dataset by Struß et al. (2019) and comprises three levels of annotation, i.e., six coarse-grained speech acts, 23 fine-grained speech acts and 14 different sentence types. Furthermore, we provide an evaluation in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The dataset is made publicly available under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
Semantic Storytelling describes the goal to automatically and semi-automatically generate stories based on extracted, processed, classified and annotated information from large content resources. Essential is the automated processing of text segments extracted from different content resources by identifying the relevance of a text segment to a topic and its semantic relation to other text segments. In this paper we present an approach to create an automatic classifier for semantic relations between extracted text segments from different news articles. We devise custom annotation guidelines based on various discourse structure theories and annotate a dataset of 2,501 sentence pairs extracted from 2,638 Wikinews articles. For the annotation, we developed a dedicated annotation tool. Based on the constructed dataset, we perform initial experiments with Transformer language models that are trained for the automatic classification of semantic relations. Our results with promising high accuracy scores suggest the validity and applicability of our approach for future Semantic Storytelling solutions.
Interoperability is a necessity for the resolution of complex tasks that require the interconnection of several NLP services. This article presents the approaches that were adopted in three scenarios to address the respective interoperability issues. The first scenario describes the creation of a common REST API for a specific platform, the second scenario presents the interconnection of several platforms via mapping of different representation formats and the third scenario shows the complexities of interoperability through semantic schema mapping or automatic translation.
We present our submission to the first subtask of GermEval 2021 (classification of German Facebook comments as toxic or not). Binary sequence classification is a standard NLP task with known state-of-the-art methods. Therefore, we focus on data preparation by using two different techniques: task-specific pre-training and data augmentation. First, we pre-train multilingual transformers (XLM-RoBERTa and MT5) on 12 hatespeech detection datasets in nine different languages. In terms of F1, we notice an improvement of 10% on average, using task-specific pre-training. Second, we perform data augmentation by labelling unlabelled comments, taken from Facebook, to increase the size of the training dataset by 79%. Models trained on the augmented training dataset obtain on average +0.0282 (+5%) F1 score compared to models trained on the original training dataset. Finally, the combination of the two techniques allows us to obtain an F1 score of 0.6899 with XLM- RoBERTa and 0.6859 with MT5. The code of the project is available at: https://github.com/airKlizz/germeval2021toxic.
Europe is a multilingual society, in which dozens of languages are spoken. The only option to enable and to benefit from multilingualism is through Language Technologies (LT), i.e., Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies. We describe the European Language Grid (ELG), which is targeted to evolve into the primary platform and marketplace for LT in Europe by providing one umbrella platform for the European LT landscape, including research and industry, enabling all stakeholders to upload, share and distribute their services, products and resources. At the end of our EU project, which will establish a legal entity in 2022, the ELG will provide access to approx. 1300 services for all European languages as well as thousands of data sets.
We present a data set consisting of German news articles labeled for political bias on a five-point scale in a semi-supervised way. While earlier work on hyperpartisan news detection uses binary classification (i.e., hyperpartisan or not) and English data, we argue for a more fine-grained classification, covering the full political spectrum (i.e., far-left, left, centre, right, far-right) and for extending research to German data. Understanding political bias helps in accurately detecting hate speech and online abuse. We experiment with different classification methods for political bias detection. Their comparatively low performance (a macro-F1 of 43 for our best setup, compared to a macro-F1 of 79 for the binary classification task) underlines the need for more (balanced) data annotated in a fine-grained way.
We present a workflow manager for the flexible creation and customisation of NLP processing pipelines. The workflow manager addresses challenges in interoperability across various different NLP tasks and hardware-based resource usage. Based on the four key principles of generality, flexibility, scalability and efficiency, we present the first version of the workflow manager by providing details on its custom definition language, explaining the communication components and the general system architecture and setup. We currently implement the system, which is grounded and motivated by real-world industry use cases in several innovation and transfer projects.
With regard to the wider area of AI/LT platform interoperability, we concentrate on two core aspects: (1) cross-platform search and discovery of resources and services; (2) composition of cross-platform service workflows. We devise five different levels (of increasing complexity) of platform interoperability that we suggest to implement in a wider federation of AI/LT platforms. We illustrate the approach using the five emerging AI/LT platforms AI4EU, ELG, Lynx, QURATOR and SPEAKER.
Legal technology is currently receiving a lot of attention from various angles. In this contribution we describe the main technical components of a system that is currently under development in the European innovation project Lynx, which includes partners from industry and research. The key contribution of this paper is a workflow manager that enables the flexible orchestration of workflows based on a portfolio of Natural Language Processing and Content Curation services as well as a Multilingual Legal Knowledge Graph that contains semantic information and meaningful references to legal documents. We also describe different use cases with which we experiment and develop prototypical solutions.
Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.
With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT business is also fragmented – by nation states, languages, verticals and sectors, significantly holding back its impact. The European Language Grid (ELG) project addresses this fragmentation by establishing the ELG as the primary platform for LT in Europe. The ELG is a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial LTs for all European languages, including running tools and services as well as data sets and resources. Once fully operational, it will enable the commercial and non-commercial European LT community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the ELG, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources. The ELG will boost the Multilingual Digital Single Market towards a thriving European LT community, creating new jobs and opportunities. Furthermore, the ELG project organises two open calls for up to 20 pilot projects. It also sets up 32 national competence centres and the European LT Council for outreach and coordination purposes.
The current scientific and technological landscape is characterised by the increasing availability of data resources and processing tools and services. In this setting, metadata have emerged as a key factor facilitating management, sharing and usage of such digital assets. In this paper we present ELG-SHARE, a rich metadata schema catering for the description of Language Resources and Technologies (processing and generation services and tools, models, corpora, term lists, etc.), as well as related entities (e.g., organizations, projects, supporting documents, etc.). The schema powers the European Language Grid platform that aims to be the primary hub and marketplace for industry-relevant Language Technology in Europe. ELG-SHARE has been based on various metadata schemas, vocabularies, and ontologies, as well as related recommendations and guidelines.
We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.
We present a new corpus comprising annotations of medical entities in case reports, originating from PubMed Central’s open access library. In the case reports, we annotate cases, conditions, findings, factors and negation modifiers. Moreover, where applicable, we annotate relations between these entities. As such, this is the first corpus of this kind made available to the scientific community in English. It enables the initial investigation of automatic information extraction from case reports through tasks like Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction and (sentence/paragraph) relevance detection. Additionally, we present four strong baseline systems for the detection of medical entities made available through the annotated dataset.
We explore to what extent knowledge about the pre-trained language model that is used is beneficial for the task of abstractive summarization. To this end, we experiment with conditioning the encoder and decoder of a Transformer-based neural model on the BERT language model. In addition, we propose a new method of BERT-windowing, which allows chunk-wise processing of texts longer than the BERT window size. We also explore how locality modeling, i.e., the explicit restriction of calculations to the local context, can affect the summarization ability of the Transformer. This is done by introducing 2-dimensional convolutional self-attention into the first layers of the encoder. The results of our models are compared to a baseline and the state-of-the-art models on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset. We additionally train our model on the SwissText dataset to demonstrate usability on German. Both models outperform the baseline in ROUGE scores on two datasets and show its superiority in a manual qualitative analysis.
Traditional document similarity measures provide a coarse-grained distinction between similar and dissimilar documents. Typically, they do not consider in what aspects two documents are similar. This limits the granularity of applications like recommender systems that rely on document similarity. In this paper, we extend similarity with aspect information by performing a pairwise document classification task. We evaluate our aspect-based document similarity approach for research papers. Paper citations indicate the aspect-based similarity, i.e., the title of a section in which a citation occurs acts as a label for the pair of citing and cited paper. We apply a series of Transformer models such as RoBERTa, ELECTRA, XLNet, and BERT variations and compare them to an LSTM baseline. We perform our experiments on two newly constructed datasets of 172,073 research paper pairs from the ACL Anthology and CORD-19 corpus. According to our results, SciBERT is the best performing system with F1-scores of up to 0.83. A qualitative analysis validates our quantitative results and indicates that aspect-based document similarity indeed leads to more fine-grained recommendations.
We present a portfolio of natural legal language processing and document curation services currently under development in a collaborative European project. First, we give an overview of the project and the different use cases, while, in the main part of the article, we focus upon the 13 different processing services that are being deployed in different prototype applications using a flexible and scalable microservices architecture. Their orchestration is operationalised using a content and document curation workflow manager.
We present an approach at identifying a specific class of events, movement action events (MAEs), in a data set that consists of ca. 2,800 personal letters exchanged by the German architect Erich Mendelsohn and his wife, Luise. A backend system uses these and other semantic analysis results as input for an authoring environment that digital curators can use to produce new pieces of digital content. In our example case, the human expert will receive recommendations from the system with the goal of putting together a travelogue, i.e., a description of the trips and journeys undertaken by the couple. We describe the components and architecture and also apply the system to news data.
We present a prototypical content curation dashboard, to be used in the newsroom, and several of its underlying semantic content analysis components (such as named entity recognition, entity linking, summarisation and temporal expression analysis). The idea is to enable journalists (a) to process incoming content (agency reports, twitter feeds, reports, blog posts, social media etc.) and (b) to create new articles more easily and more efficiently. The prototype system also allows the automatic annotation of events in incoming content for the purpose of supporting journalists in identifying important, relevant or meaningful events and also to adapt the content currently in production accordingly in a semi-automatic way. One of our long-term goals is to support journalists building up entire storylines with automatic means. In the present prototype they are generated in a backend service using clustering methods that operate on the extracted events.
We present a system for the detection of the stance of headlines with regard to their corresponding article bodies. The approach can be applied in fake news, especially clickbait detection scenarios. The component is part of a larger platform for the curation of digital content; we consider veracity and relevancy an increasingly important part of curating online information. We want to contribute to the debate on how to deal with fake news and related online phenomena with technological means, by providing means to separate related from unrelated headlines and further classifying the related headlines. On a publicly available data set annotated for the stance of headlines with regard to their corresponding article bodies, we achieve a (weighted) accuracy score of 89.59.
We describe our submissions for SemEval-2017 Task 8, Determining Rumour Veracity and Support for Rumours. The Digital Curation Technologies (DKT) team at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) participated in two subtasks: Subtask A (determining the stance of a message) and Subtask B (determining veracity of a message, closed variant). In both cases, our implementation consisted of a Multivariate Logistic Regression (Maximum Entropy) classifier coupled with hand-written patterns and rules (heuristics) applied in a post-process cascading fashion. We provide a detailed analysis of the system performance and report on variants of our systems that were not part of the official submission.
The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2017, the task was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. In this paper, we define the task and evaluation methodology, describe how the data sets were prepared, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems.
META-NET is a European network of excellence, founded in 2010, that consists of 60 research centres in 34 European countries. One of the key visions and goals of META-NET is a truly multilingual Europe, which is substantially supported and realised through language technologies. In this article we provide an overview of recent developments around the multilingual Europe topic, we also describe recent and upcoming events as well as recent and upcoming strategy papers. Furthermore, we provide overviews of two new emerging initiatives, the CEF.AT and ELRC activity on the one hand and the Cracking the Language Barrier federation on the other. The paper closes with several suggested next steps in order to address the current challenges and to open up new opportunities.
Language Resources (LRs) are an essential ingredient of current approaches in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology and related fields. LRs are collections of spoken or written language data, typically annotated with linguistic analysis information. Different types of LRs exist, for example, corpora, ontologies, lexicons, collections of spoken language data (audio), or collections that also include video (multimedia, multimodal). Often, LRs are distributed with specific tools, documentation, manuals or research publications. The different phases that involve creating and distributing an LR can be conceptualised as a life cycle. While the idea of handling the LR production and maintenance process in terms of a life cycle has been brought up quite some time ago, a best practice model or common approach can still be considered a research gap. This article wants to help fill this gap by proposing an initial version of a generic Language Resource Life Cycle that can be used to inform, direct, control and evaluate LR research and development activities (including description, management, production, validation and evaluation workflows).
This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiatives work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.
This paper presents META-SHARE (www.meta-share.eu), an open language resource infrastructure, and its usage since its Europe-wide deployment in early 2013. META-SHARE is a network of repositories that store language resources (data, tools and processing services) documented with high-quality metadata, aggregated in central inventories allowing for uniform search and access. META-SHARE was developed by META-NET (www.meta-net.eu) and aims to serve as an important component of a language technology marketplace for researchers, developers, professionals and industrial players, catering for the full development cycle of language technology, from research through to innovative products and services. The observed usage in its initial steps, the steadily increasing number of network nodes, resources, users, queries, views and downloads are all encouraging and considered as supportive of the choices made so far. In tandem, take-up activities like direct linking and processing of datasets by language processing services as well as metadata transformation to RDF are expected to open new avenues for data and resources linking and boost the organic growth of the infrastructure while facilitating language technology deployment by much wider research communities and industrial sectors.
We present initial results from an international and multi-disciplinary research collaboration that aims at the construction of a reference corpus of web genres. The primary application scenario for which we plan to build this resource is the automatic identification of web genres. Web genres are rather difficult to capture and to describe in their entirety, but we plan for the finished reference corpus to contain multi-level tags of the respective genre or genres a web document or a website instantiates. As the construction of such a corpus is by no means a trivial task, we discuss several alternatives that are, for the time being, mostly based on existing collections. Furthermore, we discuss a shared set of genre categories and a multi-purpose tool as two additional prerequisites for a reference corpus of web genres.
We present an approach for querying collections of heterogeneous linguistic corpora that are annotated on multiple layers using arbitrary XML-based markup languages. An OWL ontology provides a homogenising view on the conceptually different markup languages so that a common querying framework can be established using the method of ontology-based query expansion. In addition, we present a highly flexible web-based graphical interface that can be used to query corpora with regard to several different linguistic properties such as, for example, syntactic tree fragments. This interface can also be used for ontology-based querying of multiple corpora simultaneously.
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.