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Ungoliant: An optimized pipeline for the generation of a very large-scale multilingual web corpus
(2021)
Since the introduction of large language models in Natural Language Processing, large raw corpora have played a crucial role in Computational Linguistics. However, most of these large raw corpora are either available only for English or not available to the general public due to copyright issues. Nevertheless, there are some examples of freely available multilingual corpora for training Deep Learning NLP models, such as the OSCAR and Paracrawl corpora. However, they have quality issues, especially for low-resource languages. Moreover, recreating or updating these corpora is very complex. In this work, we try to reproduce and improve the goclassy pipeline used to create the OSCAR corpus. We propose a new pipeline that is faster, modular, parameterizable, and well documented. We use it to create a corpus similar to OSCAR but larger and based on recent data. Also, unlike OSCAR, the metadata information is at the document level. We release our pipeline under an open source license and publish the corpus under a research-only license.
Making research data publicly available for evaluation or reuse is a fundamental part of good scientific practice. However, regulations such as copyright law can prevent this practice and thereby hamper scientific progress. In Germany, text-based research disciplines have for a long time been mostly unable to publish corpora made from material outside of the public domain, effectively excluding contemporary works. While there are approaches to obfuscate text material in a way that it is no longer covered by the original copyright, many use cases still require the raw textual context for evaluation or follow-up research. Recent changes in copyright now permit text and data mining on copyrighted works. However, questions regarding reusability and sharing of such corpora at a later time are still not answered to a satisfying degree. We propose a workflow that allows interested third parties to access customized excerpts of protected corpora in accordance with current German copyright law and the soon to be implemented guidelines of the Digital Single Market directive. Our prototype is a very lightweight web interface that builds on commonly used repository software and web standards.
N-grams are of utmost importance for modern linguistics and language theory. The legal status of n-grams, however, raises many practical questions. Traditionally, text snippets are considered copyrightable if they meet the originality criterion, but no clear indicators as to the minimum length of original snippets exist; moreover, the solutions adopted in some EU Member States (the paper cites German and French law as examples) are considerably different. Furthermore, recent developments in EU law (the CJEU's Pelham decision and the new right of newspaper publishers) also provide interesting arguments in this debate. The proposed paper presents the existing approaches to the legal protection of n-grams and tries to formulate some clear guidelines as to the length of n-grams that can be freely used and shared.
N-grams are of utmost importance for modern linguistics and language technology. The legal status of n-grams, however, raises many practical questions. Traditionally, text snippets are considered copyrightable if they meet the originality criterion, but no clear indicators as to the minimum length of original snippets exist; moreover, the solutions adopted in some EU Member States (the paper cites German and French law as examples) are considerably different. Furthermore, recent developments in EU law (the CJEU's Pelham decision and the new right of press publishers) also provide interesting arguments in this debate. The paper presents the existing approaches to the legal protection of n-grams and tries to formulate some clear guidelines as to the length of n-grams that can be freely used and shared.
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.
The normative layer of CLARIN is, alongside the organizational and technical layers, an essential part of the infrastructure. It consists of the regulatory framework (statutory law, case law, authoritative guidelines, etc.), the contractual framework (licenses, terms of service, etc.), and ethical norms. Navigating the normative layer requires expertise, experience, and qualified effort. In order to advise the Board of Directors, a standing committee dedicated to legal and ethical issues, the CLIC, was created. Since its establishment in 2012, the CLIC has made considerable efforts to provide not only the BoD but also the general public with information and guidance. It has published many articles (both in proceedings of CLARIN conferences and in its own White Paper Series) and developed several LegalTech tools. It also runs a Legal Information Platform, where accessible information on various issues affecting language resources can be found.
Providing online repositories for language resources is one of the main activities of CLARIN centres. The legal framework regarding liability of Service Providers for content uploaded by their users has recently been modified by the new Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. A new category of Service Providers, Online Content-Sharing Service Providers (OCSSPs), was added. It is subject to a complex and strict framework, including the requirement to obtain licenses from rightholders for the hosted content. This paper provides the background and effect of these changes to law and aims to initiate a debate on how CLARIN repositories should navigate this new legal landscape.
Researchers in Natural Language Processing rely on availability of data and software, ideally under open licenses, but little is done to actively encourage it. In fact, the current Copyright framework grants exclusive rights to authors to copy their works, make them available to the public and make derivative works (such as annotated language corpora). Moreover, in the EU databases are protected against unauthorized extraction and re-utilization of their contents. Therefore, proper public licensing plays a crucial role in providing access to research data. A public license is a license that grants certain rights not to one particular user, but to the general public (everybody). Our article presents a tool that we developed and whose purpose is to assist the user in the licensing process. As software and data should be licensed under different licenses, the tool is composed of two separate parts: Data and Software. The underlying logic as well as elements of the graphic interface are presented below.
The possibilities of re-use and archiving of spoken and written corpora are affected by personality rights (depending on legal tradition also called: the right of publicity), copyright law and data protection / privacy laws. These recommendations include information about legal aspects which should be considered while creating corpora to ensure the greatest archivability and re-usability possible in compliance with current laws.
The information compiled here shall serve researchers who plan to create corpora or who are involved in evaluation of such measures as a guideline. This information is not exhaustive or to be considered as legal advice. Researchers should consult institutional legal departments and management before making legally relevant decisions. That said, further legal expertise should be sought if possible as early as project planning phases.
Grundlage dieses Artikels* 1 ist das Verbundprojekt „Nachhaltigkeit linguistischer Daten“ der drei Sonderforschungsbereiche 441, 538 und 632, dessen Ziel es ist, Lösungen für die nachhaltige Verfügbarkeit der an den SFBs vorhandenen Korpora zu entwickeln. Ein zentraler Aspekt betrifft die Klärung der Rechtslage für die Nutzung und Weitergabe linguistischer Ressourcen, die durch das Urheber- sowie das Datenschutzrecht geschützt sind. Eine als indifferent wahrgenommene rechtliche Situation wird in der Praxis oft als das entscheidende Hindernis für die Weitergabe linguistischer Daten angeführt. Tatsächlich jedoch sind Nutzung und Weitergabe von Daten zu wissenschaftlichen Zwecken normativ geregelt. Problematisch ist oftmals die Einordnung der speziellen linguistischen Daten als Schutzgegenstand sowie die Tatsache, dass an linguistische Daten und Datensammlungen aufgrund ihrer komplexen und vielschichtigen Beschaffenheit durchaus mehrere Urheber Rechte besitzen können, die sich auf verschiedene Inhalte beziehen. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über das geltende Recht sowie die juristischen und natürlichen Personen, die potentiell Rechte an linguistisch aufbereiteten Datenkollektionen besitzen. Es ist nicht Gegenstand dieses Artikels, rechtsverbindliche Aussagen zu treffen, die auf eine Nutzung und Weitergabe jedweder Daten angewandt werden. Der Artikel orientiert sich in seiner Struktur und thematischen Tiefe bewusst nicht an einem juristischen Publikum, sondern beschreibt die Problematik aus geisteswissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Zusammen mit einem Überblick über das vom Umgang mit linguistischen Datensammlungen betroffene Recht, das Urheberrechtsgesetz (Abschnitt 1) und das Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (Abschnitt 2), wird in den jeweiligen Abschnitten auch eine Klassifikation der Daten aus juristischer Sicht vorgenommen. Anschließend werden Lösungsansätze vorgestellt, die im Rahmen des o. g. Verbundprojektes erarbeitet werden (Abschnitt 3).
Digital Text Collections, Linguistic Research Data, and Mashups: Notes on the Legal Situation
(2008)
Comprehensive data repositories are an essential part of practically all research carried out in the digital humanities nowadays. For example, library science, literary studies, and computational and corpus linguistics strongly depend on online archives that are highly sustainable and that contain not only digitized texts but also audio and video data as well as additional information such as metadata and arbitrary annotations. Current Web technologies, especially those that are related to what is commonly referred to as the Web 2.0, provide a number of novel functions such as multiuser editing or the inclusion of third-party content and applications that are also highly attractive for research applications in the areas mentioned above. Hand in hand with this development goes a high degree of legal uncertainty. The special nature of the data entails that, in quite a few cases, there are multiple holders of personal rights (mostly copyright) to different layers of data that often have different origins. This article discusses the legal problems of multiple authorships in private, commercial, and research environments. We also introduce significant differences between European and U.S. law with regard to the handling of this kind of data for scientific purposes.
This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on the International Corpus of English (ICE). As such, ICC will contain approximately the same balance of forty percent of written language and 60 percent of spoken language distributed across 27 different text types and contexts. A number of issues encountered by the project teams are discussed, ranging from copyright and data sustainability to technical advances in data distribution.
Contents:
1. Julien Abadji, Pedro Javier Ortiz Suárez, Laurent Romary and Benoît Sagot: "Ungoliant: An Optimized Pipeline for the Generation of a Very Large-Scale Multilingual Web Corpus", S.1-9.
2. Markus Gärtner, Felicitas Kleinkopf, Melanie Andresen and Sibylle Hermann: "Corpus Reusability and Copyright - Challenges and Opportunities", S.10-19.
3. Nils Diewald, Eliza Margaretha and Marc Kupietz: "Lessons learned in Quality Management for Online Research Software Tools in Linguistics", S.20-26.