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Open Science and language data: Expectations vs. reality. The role of research data infrastructures
(2023)
Language data are essential for any scientific endeavor. However, unlike numerical data, language data are often protected by copyright, as they easily meet the threshold of originality. The role of research infrastructures (such CLARIN, DARIAH, and Text+) is to bridge the gap between uses allowed by statutory exceptions and the requirements of Open Science. This is achieved on the one hand by sharing language data produced by research organisations with the widest possible circle of persons, and on the other by mutualizing efforts towards copyright clearance and appropriate licensing of datasets.
Als Teil der NFDI vernetzt Text+ ortsverteilt verschiedenste Daten und Dienste für die geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung und stellt sie der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft FAIR zur Verfügung. In diesem Beitrag beschreiben wir die Umsetzung beispielhaft im Bereich der Text+ Datendomäne Sammlungen anhand von Korpora, die in verschiedenen Disziplinen Verwendung finden. Die Infrastruktur ist auf Erweiterbarkeit ausgelegt, so dass auch weitere Ressourcen über Text+ verfügbar gemacht werden können. Enthalten ist auch ein Ausblick auf weitere zu erwartende Entwicklungen. Ein Beitrag zur 9. Tagung des Verbands "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum" - DHd 2023 Open Humanities Open Culture.
Die durch die Covid-19-Pandemie bedingte Umstellung der Präsenzlehre auf digitale Lehr- und Lernformate stellte Lehrende und Studierende gleichermaßen vor eine Herausforderung. Innerhalb kürzester Zeit musste die Nutzung von Plattformen und digitalen Tools erlernt und getestet werden. Der Beitrag stellt exemplarisch Dienste und Werkzeuge von CLARIAH-DE vor und erläutert, wie die digitale Forschungsinfrastruktur Lehrende und Studierende auch im Rahmen der digitalen Lehre unterstützen kann.
In 2010, ISO published a standard for syntactic annotation, ISO 24615:2010 (SynAF). Back then, the document specified a comprehensive reference model for the representation of syntactic annotations, but no accompanying XML serialisation. ISO’s subcommittee on language resource management (ISO TC 37/SC 4) is working on making the SynAF serialisation ISOTiger an additional part of the standard. This contribution addresses the current state of development of ISOTiger, along with a number of open issues on which we are seeking community feedback in order to ensure that ISOTiger becomes a useful extension to the SynAF reference model.
The Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) was established in Mannheim in 1964. Since then, it has been at the forefront of innovation in German linguistics as a hub for digital language data. This chapter presents various lessons learnt from over five decades of work by the IDS, ranging from the importance of sustainability, through its strong technical base and FAIR principles, to the IDS’ role in national and international cooperation projects and its expertise on legal and ethical issues related to language resources and language technology.
XML has been designed for creating structured documents, but the information that is encoded in these structures are, by definition, out of scope for XML. Additional sources, normally not easily interpretable by computers, such as documentation are needed to determine the intention of specific tags in a tag-set. The Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) takes a rather pragmatic approach to foster interoperability between XML instances in the domain of metadata descriptions for language resources. This paper gives an overview of this approach.
Interoperability in an Infrastructure Enabling Multidisciplinary Research: The case of CLARIN
(2020)
CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure providing access to language resources and technologies for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It supports the use and study of language data in general and aims to increase the potential for comparative research of cultural and societal phenomena across the boundaries of languages and disciplines, all in line with the European agenda for Open Science. Data infrastructures such as CLARIN have recently embarked on the emerging frameworks for the federation of infrastructural services, such as the European Open Science Cloud and the integration of services resulting from multidisciplinary collaboration in federated services for the wider domain of the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In this paper we describe the interoperability requirements that arise through the existing ambitions and the emerging frameworks. The interoperability theme will be addressed at several levels, including organisation and ecosystem, design of workflow services, data curation, performance measurement and collaboration. For each level, some concrete outcomes are described.
Beyond Citations: Corpus-based Methods for Detecting the Impact of Research Outcomes on Society
(2020)
This paper proposes, implements and evaluates a novel, corpus-based approach for identifying categories indicative of the impact of research via a deductive (top-down, from theory to data) and an inductive (bottom-up, from data to theory) approach. The resulting categorization schemes differ in substance. Research outcomes are typically assessed by using bibliometric methods, such as citation counts and patterns, or alternative metrics, such as references to research in the media. Shortcomings with these methods are their inability to identify impact of research beyond academia (bibliometrics) and considering text-based impact indicators beyond those that capture attention (altmetrics). We address these limitations by leveraging a mixed-methods approach for eliciting impact categories from experts, project personnel (deductive) and texts (inductive). Using these categories, we label a corpus of project reports per category schema, and apply supervised machine learning to infer these categories from project reports. The classification results show that we can predict deductively and inductively derived impact categories with 76.39% and 78.81% accuracy (F1-score), respectively. Our approach can complement solutions from bibliometrics and scientometrics for assessing the impact of research and studying the scope and types of advancements transferred from academia to society.
This abstract discusses the possibility to adopt a CLARIN Data Protection Code of Conduct pursuant art. 40 of the General Data Protection Regulation. Such a code of conduct would have important benefits for the entire language research community. The final section of this abstract proposes a roadmap to the CLARIN Data Protection Code of Conduct, listing various stages of its drafting and approval procedures.
New exceptions for Text and Data Mining and their possible impact on the CLARIN infrastructure
(2018)
The proposed paper discusses new exceptions for Text and Data Mining that have recently been adopted in some EU Member States, and probably will soon be adopted also at the EU level. These exceptions are of great significance for language scientists, as they exempt those who compile corpora from the obligation to obtain authorisation from rightholders. However, corpora compiled on the basis of such exceptions cannot be freely shared, which in a long run may have serious consequences for Open Science and the functioning of research infrastructure such as CLARIN ERIC.
Deutsche Geschichte-Digital: Ergebnisse der TEI-Konvertierung und Integration in Pilotprojekten
(2018)
In this paper we present an approach to faceted search in large language resource repositories. This kind of search which enables users to browse through the repository by choosing their personal sequence of facets heavily relies on the availability of descriptive metadata for the objects in the repository. This approach therefore informs the collection of a minimal set of metatdata for language resources. The work described in this paper has been funded by the EC within the ESFRI infrastructure project CLARIN.
This paper presents the application of the <tiger2/> format to various linguistic scenarios with the aim of making it the standard serialisation for the ISO 24615 [1] (SynAF) standard. After outlining the main characteristics of both the SynAF metamodel and the <tiger2/> format, as extended from the initial Tiger XML format [2], we show through a range of different language families how <tiger2/> covers a variety of constituency and dependency based analyses.
The motivation for this article is to describe a methodology for interrelating and analyzing language and theory-specific corpus data from various languages. As an example phenomeon we use information structure (IS, see [3]) in treebanks from three languages: Spanish, Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese are typologically close, while both are typologically different from Spanish. Therefore, the problem of annotating IS is that there are diverging language-specific formal linguistic means for the realization of IS-functions (like “topicalization / contrast”) on various levels like prosody, morphology and word-order. Hence, it is necessary to describe the relations between language-specific formal means and functional views on IS, and how to operationalize these relations for corpus analysis.
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 an interface that enables users to query and to visualise corpora. The project in which the system is being 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 annota-tions. In more general terms, our goal is to enable solutions that leverage the interoperability, reusability, and sustainability of heterogeneous collections of language resources.
The German Historical Institute Washington (GHI) is in the development phase of German History Digital (GH-D), a transatlantic digital initiative to meet the scholarly needs of historians and their students facing new historiographical and technological challenges. In the proposed paper we will discuss the research goals, methodology, prototyping, and development strategy of GH-D as infrastructure to facilitate transnational historical knowledge co-creation for the large community of researchers and students already relying on digital resources of the GHI and for the growing constituency of citizen scholars.
This paper discusses work on the sustainability of linguistic resources as it was conducted in various projects, including the work of a three year project Sustainability of Linguistic Resources which finished in December 2008, a follow-up project, Sustainable linguistic data, and initiatives related to the work of the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) on developing standards for linguistic resources. The individual projects have been conducted at German collaborative research centres at the Universities of Potsdam, Hamburg and Tübingen, where the sustainability work was coordinated.
This paper provides a new generation of a markup language by introducing the Freestyle Markup Language (FML). Demands placed on the language are elaborated, considering current standards and discussions. Conception, a grammatical definition, a corresponding object graph and the bi-directional unambiguous transformation between these two congruent representation forms are set up. The result of this paper is a fundamental definition of a completely new markup language, consolidating many deficiency-discourses and experiences into one particular implementation concept, encouraging the evolution of markup.
TEI Feature Structures as a Representation Format for Multiple Annotation and Generic XML Documents
(2009)
Feature structures are mathematical entities (rooted labeled directed acyclic graphs) that can be represented as graph displays, attribute value matrices or as XML adhering to the constraints of a specialized TEI tag set. We demonstrate that this latter ISO-standardized format can be used as an integrative storage and exchange format for sets of multiple annotation XML documents. This specific domain of application is rooted in the approach of multiple annotations, which marks a possible solution for XML-compliant markup in scenarios with conflicting annotation hierarchies. A more extreme proposal consists in the possible use as a meta-representation format for generic XML documents. For both scenarios our strategy concerning pertinent feature structure representations is grounded on the XDM (XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model). The ubiquitous hierarchical and sequential relationships within XML documents are represented by specific features that take ordered list values. The mapping to the TEI feature structure format has been implemented in the form of an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet. It can be characterized as exploiting aspects of both the push and pull processing paradigm as appropriate. An indexing mechanism is provided with regard to the multiple annotation documents scenario. Hence, implicit links concerning identical primary data are made explicit in the result format. In comparison to alternative representations, the TEI-based format does well in many respects, since it is both integrative and well-formed XML. However, the result documents tend to grow very large depending on the size of the input documents and their respective markup structure. This may also be considered as a downside regarding the proposed use for generic XML documents. On the positive side, it may be possible to achieve a hookup to methods and applications that have been developed for feature structure representations in the fields of (computational) linguistics and knowledge representation.
This paper introduces the recently started DRuKoLA-project that aims at providing mechanisms to flexibly draw virtual comparable corpora from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language CoRoLa in order to use these virtual corpora as empirical basis for contrastive linguistic research.
The present paper describes Corpus Query Lingua Franca (ISO CQLF), a specification designed at ISO Technical Committee 37 Subcommittee 4 “Language resource management” for the purpose of facilitating the comparison of properties of corpus query languages. We overview the motivation for this endeavour and present its aims and its general architecture. CQLF is intended as a multi-part specification; here, we concentrate on the basic metamodel that provides a frame that the other parts fit in.
KorAP is a corpus search and analysis platform, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). It supports very large corpora with multiple annotation layers, multiple query languages, and complex licensing scenarios. KorAP’s design aims to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable to serve the German Reference Corpus DEREKO for at least the next decade. To meet these requirements, we have adopted a highly modular microservice-based architecture. This paper outlines our approach: An architecture consisting of small components that are easy to extend, replace, and maintain. The components include a search backend, a user and corpus license management system, and a web-based user frontend. We also describe a general corpus query protocol used by all microservices for internal communications. KorAP is open source, licensed under BSD-2, and available on GitHub.
We present an approach on how to investigate what kind of semantic information is regularly associated with the structural markup of scientific articles. This approach addresses the need for an explicit formal description of the semantics of text-oriented XML-documents. The domain of our investigation is a corpus of scientific articles from psychology and linguistics from both English and German online available journals. For our analyses, we provide XML-markup representing two kinds of semantic levels: the thematic level (i.e. topics in the text world that the article is about) and the functional or rhetorical level. Our hypothesis is that these semantic levels correlate with the articles’ document structure also represented in XML. Articles have been annotated with the appropriate information. Each of the three informational levels is modelled in a separate XML document, since in our domain, the different description levels might conflict so that it is impossible to model them within a single XML document. For comparing and mining the resulting multi-layered XML annotations of one article, a Prolog-based approach is used. It focusses on the comparison of XML markup that is distributed among different documents. Prolog predicates have been defined for inferring relations between levels of information that are modelled in separate XML documents. We demonstrate how the Prolog tool is applied in our corpus analyses.
Igel is a small XQuery-based web application for examining a collection of document grammars; in particular, for comparing related document grammars to get a better overview of their differences and similarities. In its initial form, Igel reads only DTDs and provides only simple lists of constructs in them (elements, attributes, notations, parameter entities). Our continuing work is aimed at making Igel provide more sophisticated and useful information about document grammars and building the application into a useful tool for the analysis (and the maintenance!) of families of related document grammars
Gegenstand des Workshop-Beitrags ist die Verknüpfung heterogener linguistischer Ressourcen. Eine bedeutende Teilmenge von Ressourcen in der gegenwärtigen linguistischen Forschung und Anwendung besteht zum einen aus XML-annotierten Textdokumenten und zum anderen aus externen Ressourcen wie Grammatiken, Lexika oder Ontologien. Es wird eine Architektur vorgestellt, die eine Integration heterogener Ressourcen erlaubt, wobei die Methoden zur Integration unabhängig von der jeweiligen Anwendung sind und somit verschiedene Verknüpfungen ermöglichen. Eine exemplarische Anwendung der Methodologie ist die Analyse anaphorischer Beziehungen.
Many XML-related activities (e.g. the creation of a new schema) already address issues with different languages, scripts, and cultures. Nevertheless, a need exists for additional mechanisms and guidelines for more effective internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) in XML-related contents and processes. The W3C Internationalization Tag Set Working Group (W3C ITS WG) addresses this need and works on data categories, representation mechanisms and guidelines related to i18n and l10n support in the XML realm. This paper describes initial findings from the (W3C ITS WG). Furthermore, the paper discusses how these findings relate to specific schema languages, and complementary technologies like namespace sectioning, schema annotation and the description of processing chains. The paper exemplifies why certain requirements only can be met by a combination of technologies, and discusses these technologies.
The paper discusses two topics: firstly an approach of using multiple layers of annotation is sketched out. Regarding the XML representation this approach is similar to standoff annotation. A second topic is the use of heterogeneous linguistic resources (e.g., XML annotated documents, taggers, lexical nets) as a source for semiautomatic multi-dimensional markup to resolve typical linguistic issues, dealing with anaphora resolution as a case study.
The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, an approach is presented how to select the correct antecedent for an anaphoric element according to the kind of text segments in which both of them occur. Basically, information on logical text structure (e.g. chapters, sections, paragraphs) is used in order to select the antecedent life span of a linguistic expression, i.e. some linguistic expressions are more likely to be chosen as an antecedent throughout the whole text than others. In addition, an appropriate search scope for an anaphora expressed by an expression can be defined according to the document structuring elements that include the linguistic expression. Corpus investigations give rise to the supposition that logical text structure influences the search scope of candidates for antecedents. Second, a solution is presented how to integrate the resources used for anaphora resolution. In this approach, multi-layered XML annotation is used in order to make a set of resources accessible for the anaphora resolution system.
XML-based technologies offer powerful resources for open source applications in the field of e-learning. The paper describes a model of hypertext as interlinked structures that can be intertwined by cross-annotation linking. This infrastructure integrates multiple perspectives and allows creating a personal learning environment. We exemplify the approach in a case study: the Hamlet project. In the course of this project, several German translations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet have been collected and annotated. Two different annotation layers are used to achieve a cross-linking reference between the various German translations. We will describe the theoretical background of cross-annotation linking and the actual technological implementation of the system. Additionally, we will use the personas method to gain insights into the potential benefit of the system as a personal learning environment.
Making CONCUR work
(2005)
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!
This paper proposes a methodology for querying linguistic data represented in different corpus formats. Examples of the need for queries over such heterogeneous resources are the corpus-based analysis of multimodal phenomena like the interaction of gestures and prosodic features, or syntax-related phenomena like information structure which exceed the expressive power of a tree-centered corpus format. Query languages (QLs) currently under development are strongly connected to corpus formats, like the NITE Object Model (NOM, Carletta et al., 2003) or the Meta-Annotation Infrastructure for ATLAS (MAIA, Laprun and Fiscus, 2002). The parallel development of linguistic query languages and corpus formats is due to the fact that general purpose query languages like XQuery (Boag et al., 2003) do not fulfill the changing needs of linguistically motivated queries, e.g. to give access to (non-)hierarchically organized, theory and language dependent annotations of multi modal signals and/or text. This leads to the problem that existing corpus formats and query languages are hard to reuse. They have to be re developed and re-implemented time-consumingly and expensively for unforeseen tasks. This paper describes an approach for overcoming these problems and a sample application.
This paper describes a corpus of Japanese task-oriented dialogues, i.e. its data, annotations, analysis methodology and preliminary results for the modeling of co-referential phenomena. Current corpus based approaches to co-reference concentrate on textual data from English or other European languages. Hence, the emerging language-general models of co-reference miss input from dialogue data of non-European languages. We aim to fill this gap and contribute to a model of co-reference on various language-specific and language-general levels.
Overlap in markup occurs where some markup structures do not nest, such as where the structural division of the text into lists, sections, etc., differs from the syntactic division of the text into sentences and phrases. The Multiple Annotation solution to this problem (redundant encoding in multiple forms) has many advantages: it is based on XML, the modeling of alternative annotations is possible, each level can be viewed separately, and new levels can be added at any time. But it has the significant disadvantage of independence of the separate files. These multiply annotated files can be regarded as an interrelated unit, with the text serving as the implicit link. Two representations of the information contained in the multiple files (one in Prolog and one in XML) can be programmatically derived and used together for editing, for inference, or for unification of the multiply annotated documents.
Co-reference annotation and resources: a multilingual corpus of typologically diverse languages
(2002)
This article introduces a dialogue corpus containing data from two typologically different languages, Japanese and Kilivila. The corpus is annotated in accordance with language specific annotation schemes for co-referential and similar relations. The article describes the corpus data, the properties of language specific co-reference in the two languages and a methodology for its annotation. Examples from the corpus show how this methodology is used in the workflow of the annotation process.
We describe a general two-stage procedure for re-using a custom corpus for spoken language system development involving a transformation from character-based markup to XML, and DSSSL stylesheet-driven XML markup enhancement with multiple lexical tag trees. The procedure was used to generate a fully tagged corpus; alternatively with greater economy of computing resources, it can be employed as a parametrised ‘tagging on demand’ filter. The implementation will shortly be released as a public resource together with the corpus (German spoken dialogue, about 500k word form tokens) and lexicon (about 75k word form types).
This paper deals with the problem of how to interrelate theory-specific treebanks and how to transform one treebank format to another. Currently, two approaches to achieve these goals can be differentiated. The first creates a mapping algorithm between treebank formats. Categories of a source format are transformed into a target format via a given set of general or language-specific mapping rules. The second relates treebanks via a transformation to a general model of linguistic categories, for example based on the EAGLES recommendations for syntactic annotations of corpora, or relying on the HPSG framework. This paper proposes a new methodology as a solution for these desiderata.
Linguistic corpora have been annotated by means of SGML-based markup languages for almost 20 years. We can, very roughly, differentiate between three distinct evolutionary stages of markup technologies. (1)Originally, single SGML tree-based document instances were deemed sufficient for the representation of linguistic structures. (2) Linguists began to realize that alternatives and extensions to the traditional model are needed. Formalisms such as, for example, NITE were proposed: the NITE Object Model (NOM) consists of multi-rooted trees. (3) We are now on the threshold of the third evolutionary stage: even NITE's very flexible approach is not suited for all linguistic purposes. As some structures, such as these, cannot be modeled by multi-rooted trees, an even more flexible approach is needed in order to provide a generic annotation format that is able to represent genuinely arbitrary linguistic data structures.
On the Lossless Transformation of Single-File, Multi-Layer Annotations into Multi-Rooted Trees
(2007)
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.
The Meta-data-Database of a Next Generation Sustainability Web-Platform for Language Resources
(2008)
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.
This paper describes the efforts in the field of sustainability of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim with respect to DEREKO (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German. With focus on re-usability and sustainability, we discuss its history and our future plans. We describe legal challenges related to the creation of a large and sustainable resource; sketch out the pipeline used to convert raw texts to the final corpus format and outline migration plans to TEI P5. Due to the fact, that the current version of the corpus management and query system is pushed towards its limits, we discuss the requirements for a new version which will be able to handle current and future DEREKO releases. Furthermore, we outline the institute’s plans in the field of digital preservation.
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.
This document presents ongoing work related to spoken language data within a project that aims to establish a common and unified infrastructure for the sustainable provision of linguistic primary research data at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS). In furtherance of its mission to “document the German language as it is currently used”, the project expects to enable the research community to access a broad empirical base of working material via a single platform. While the goal is to eventually cover all linguistically relevant digital resources of the IDS, including lexicographic information systems such as the IDS German Vocabulary Portal, OWID, written language corpora such as the IDS German Reference Corpus, DeReKo, and spoken language corpora such as the IDS German Speech Corpus for Research and Teaching, FOLK, the work presented here predominantly focuses on the latter type of data, i.e. speech corpora. Within this context, the present document pictures the project’s contributions to the development of standards and best practice guidelines concerning data storage, process documentation and legal issues for the sustainable preservation and long-term accessibility of primary linguistic research data.
Research today is often performed in collaborated projects composed of project partners with different backgrounds and from different institutions and countries. Standards can be a crucial tool to help harmonizing these differences and to create sustainable resources. However, choosing a standard depends on having enough information to evaluate and compare different annotation and metadata formats. In this paper we present ongoing work on an interactive, collaborative website that collects information on standards in the field of linguistics as a means to guide interested researchers.
The KorAP project (“Korpusanalyseplattform der nächste Generation”, “Corpus-analysis platform of the next generation”), carried out at the Institut fUr Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, has as its goal the development of a modem, state-of-the-art corpus-analysis platform, capable of handling very large corpora and opening the perspectives for innovative linguistic research. The platform will facilitate new linguistic findings by making it possible to manage and analyse extremely large amounts of primary data and annotations, while at the same time allowing an undistorted view of the primary un-annotated text, and thus fully satisfying expectations associated with a scientific tool. The project started in July 2011 and is funded till June 2014. The demo presentation in December will be the first version following a preliminary feature freeze, and will open the alpha testing phase of the project.
We present an approach to an aspect of managing complex access scenarios to large and heterogeneous corpora that involves handling user queries that, intentionally or due to the complexity of the queried resource, target texts or annotations outside of the given user’s permissions. We first outline the overall architecture of the corpus analysis platform KorAP, devoting some attention to the way in which it handles multiple query languages, by implementing ISO CQLF (Corpus Query Lingua Franca), which in turn constitutes a component crucial for the functionality discussed here. Next, we look at query rewriting as it is used by KorAP and zoom in on one kind of this procedure, namely the rewriting of queries that is forced by data access restrictions.
^This paper describes DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), the Archive of General Reference Corpora of Contemporary Written German at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim, and the rationale behind its development. We discuss its design, its legal background, how to access it, available metadata, linguistic annotation layers, underlying standards, ongoing developments, and aspects of using the archive for empirical linguistic research. The focus of the paper is on the advantages of DEREKO’s design as a primordial sample from which virtual corpora can be drawn for the specific purposes of individual studies. Both concepts, primordial sample and virtual corpus are explained and illustrated in detail. Furthermore, we describe in more detail how DEREKO deals with the fact that all its texts are subject to third parties’ intellectual property rights, and how it deals with the issue of replicability, which is particularly challenging given DEREKO’s dynamic growth and the possibility to construct from it an open number of virtual corpora.
This paper describes a new research initiative addressing the issue of sustainability of linguistic resources. This initiative is a cooperation between three linguistic collaborative research centres in Germany, which comprise more than 40 individual research projects altogether. These projects are involved in creating manifold language resources, especially corpora, tailored to their particular needs. The aim of the project described here is to ensure an effective and sustainable access of these data by third-party researchers beyond the termination of these projects. This goal involves a number of measures, such as the definition of a common data format to completely capture the heterogeneous information encoded in the individual corpora, the development of user-friendly and sustainably usable tools for processing (e.g. querying) the data, and the specification of common inventories of metadata and terminology. Moreover, the project aims at formulating general rules of best practice for creating, accessing, and archiving linguistic resources.
This paper describes a new research initiative addressing the issue of sustainability of linguistic resources. The initiative is a cooperation between three collaborative research centres in Germany – the SFB 441 “Linguistic Data Structures” in Tübingen, the SFB 538 “Multilingualism” in Hamburg, and the SFB 632 “Information Structure” in Potsdam/Berlin. The aim of the project is to develop methods for sustainable archiving of the diverse bodies of linguistic data used at the three sites. In the first half of the paper, the data handling solutions developed so far at the three centres are briefly introduced. This is followed by an assessment of their commonalities and differences and of what these entail for the work of the new joint initiative. The second part then sketches seven areas of open questions with respect to sustainable data handling and gives a more detailed account of two of them – integration of linguistic terminologies and development of best practice guidelines.