This thesis is a compendium of scientific works and engineering
specifications that have been contributed to a large community of
stakeholders to be copied, adapted, mixed, built upon and exploited in
any way possible to achieve a common goal: Integrating Natural Language
Processing (NLP) and Language Resources Using Linked Data
The explosion of information technology in the last two decades has led
to a substantial growth in quantity, diversity and complexity of
web-accessible linguistic data. These resources become even more useful
when linked with each other and the last few years have seen the
emergence of numerous approaches in various disciplines concerned with
linguistic resources and NLP tools. It is the challenge of our time to
store, interlink and exploit this wealth of data accumulated in more
than half a century of computational linguistics, of empirical,
corpus-based study of language, and of computational lexicography in all
its heterogeneity.
The vision of the Giant Global Graph (GGG) was conceived by Tim
Berners-Lee aiming at connecting all data on the Web and allowing to
discover new relations between this openly-accessible data. This vision
has been pursued by the Linked Open Data (LOD) community, where the
cloud of published datasets comprises 295 data repositories and more
than 30 billion RDF triples (as of September 2011).
RDF is based on globally unique and accessible URIs and it was
specifically designed to establish links between such URIs (or
resources). This is captured in the Linked Data paradigm that postulates
four rules: (1) Referred entities should be designated by URIs, (2)
these URIs should be resolvable over HTTP, (3) data should be
represented by means of standards such as RDF, (4) and a resource should
include links to other resources.
Although it is difficult to precisely identify the reasons for the
success of the LOD effort, advocates generally argue that open licenses
as well as open access are key enablers for the growth of such a network
as they provide a strong incentive for collaboration and contribution by
third parties. In his keynote at BNCOD 2011, Chris Bizer argued that
with RDF the overall data integration effort can be “split between data
publishers, third parties, and the data consumer”, a claim that can be
substantiated by observing the evolution of many large data sets
constituting the LOD cloud.
As written in the acknowledgement section, parts of this thesis has
received numerous feedback from other scientists, practitioners and
industry in many different ways. The main contributions of this thesis
are summarized here:
Part I – Introduction and Background.
During his keynote at the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference in
2012, Sören Auer stressed the decentralized, collaborative, interlinked
and interoperable nature of the Web of Data. The keynote provides strong
evidence that Semantic Web technologies such as Linked Data are on its
way to become main stream for the representation of language resources.
The jointly written companion publication for the keynote was later
extended as a book chapter in The People’s Web Meets NLP and serves as
the basis for “Introduction” and “Background”, outlining some stages of
the Linked Data publication and refinement chain. Both chapters stress
the importance of open licenses and open access as an enabler for
collaboration, the ability to interlink data on the Web as a key feature
of RDF as well as provide a discussion about scalability issues and
decentralization. Furthermore, we elaborate on how conceptual
interoperability can be achieved by (1) re-using vocabularies, (2) agile
ontology development, (3) meetings to refine and adapt ontologies and
(4) tool support to enrich ontologies and match schemata.
Part II - Language Resources as Linked Data.
“Linked Data in Linguistics” and “NLP & DBpedia, an Upward Knowledge
Acquisition Spiral” summarize the results of the Linked Data in
Linguistics (LDL) Workshop in 2012 and the NLP & DBpedia Workshop in
2013 and give a preview of the MLOD special issue. In total, five
proceedings – three published at CEUR (OKCon 2011, WoLE 2012, NLP &
DBpedia 2013), one Springer book (Linked Data in Linguistics, LDL 2012)
and one journal special issue (Multilingual Linked Open Data, MLOD to
appear) – have been (co-)edited to create incentives for scientists to
convert and publish Linked Data and thus to contribute open and/or
linguistic data to the LOD cloud. Based on the disseminated call for
papers, 152 authors contributed one or more accepted submissions to our
venues and 120 reviewers were involved in peer-reviewing.
“DBpedia as a Multilingual Language Resource” and “Leveraging the
Crowdsourcing of Lexical Resources for Bootstrapping a Linguistic Linked
Data Cloud” contain this thesis’ contribution to the DBpedia Project in
order to further increase the size and inter-linkage of the LOD Cloud
with lexical-semantic resources. Our contribution comprises extracted
data from Wiktionary (an online, collaborative dictionary similar to
Wikipedia) in more than four languages (now six) as well as
language-specific versions of DBpedia, including a quality assessment of
inter-language links between Wikipedia editions and internationalized
content negotiation rules for Linked Data. In particular the work
described in created the foundation for a DBpedia Internationalisation
Committee with members from over 15 different languages with the common
goal to push DBpedia as a free and open multilingual language resource.
Part III - The NLP Interchange Format (NIF).
“NIF 2.0 Core Specification”, “NIF 2.0 Resources and Architecture” and
“Evaluation and Related Work” constitute one of the main contribution of
this thesis. The NLP Interchange Format (NIF) is an RDF/OWL-based format
that aims to achieve interoperability between Natural Language
Processing (NLP) tools, language resources and annotations. The core
specification is included in and describes which URI schemes and RDF
vocabularies must be used for (parts of) natural language texts and
annotations in order to create an RDF/OWL-based interoperability layer
with NIF built upon Unicode Code Points in Normal Form C. In , classes
and properties of the NIF Core Ontology are described to formally define
the relations between text, substrings and their URI schemes. contains
the evaluation of NIF.
In a questionnaire, we asked questions to 13 developers using NIF. UIMA,
GATE and Stanbol are extensible NLP frameworks and NIF was not yet able
to provide off-the-shelf NLP domain ontologies for all possible domains,
but only for the plugins used in this study. After inspecting the
software, the developers agreed however that NIF is adequate enough to
provide a generic RDF output based on NIF using literal objects for
annotations. All developers were able to map the internal data structure
to NIF URIs to serialize RDF output (Adequacy). The development effort
in hours (ranging between 3 and 40 hours) as well as the number of code
lines (ranging between 110 and 445) suggest, that the implementation of
NIF wrappers is easy and fast for an average developer. Furthermore the
evaluation contains a comparison to other formats and an evaluation of
the available URI schemes for web annotation.
In order to collect input from the wide group of stakeholders, a total
of 16 presentations were given with extensive discussions and feedback,
which has lead to a constant improvement of NIF from 2010 until 2013.
After the release of NIF (Version 1.0) in November 2011, a total of 32
vocabulary employments and implementations for different NLP tools and
converters were reported (8 by the (co-)authors, including Wiki-link
corpus, 13 by people participating in our survey and 11 more, of
which we have heard). Several roll-out meetings and tutorials were held
(e.g. in Leipzig and Prague in 2013) and are planned (e.g. at LREC
2014).
Part IV - The NLP Interchange Format in Use.
“Use Cases and Applications for NIF” and “Publication of Corpora using
NIF” describe 8 concrete instances where NIF has been successfully used.
One major contribution in is the usage of NIF as the recommended RDF
mapping in the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 W3C standard
and the conversion algorithms from ITS to NIF and back. One outcome
of the discussions in the standardization meetings and telephone
conferences for ITS 2.0 resulted in the conclusion there was no
alternative RDF format or vocabulary other than NIF with the required
features to fulfill the working group charter. Five further uses of NIF
are described for the Ontology of Linguistic Annotations (OLiA), the
RDFaCE tool, the Tiger Corpus Navigator, the OntosFeeder and
visualisations of NIF using the RelFinder tool. These 8 instances
provide an implemented proof-of-concept of the features of NIF.
starts with describing the conversion and hosting of the huge Google
Wikilinks corpus with 40 million annotations for 3 million web sites.
The resulting RDF dump contains 477 million triples in a 5.6 GB
compressed dump file in turtle syntax. describes how NIF can be used to
publish extracted facts from news feeds in the RDFLiveNews tool as
Linked Data.
Part V - Conclusions.
provides lessons learned for NIF, conclusions and an outlook on future
work. Most of the contributions are already summarized above. One
particular aspect worth mentioning is the increasing number of
NIF-formated corpora for Named Entity Recognition (NER) that have come
into existence after the publication of the main NIF paper Integrating
NLP using Linked Data at ISWC 2013. These include the corpora converted
by Steinmetz, Knuth and Sack for the NLP & DBpedia workshop and an
OpenNLP-based CoNLL converter by Brümmer. Furthermore, we are aware of
three LREC 2014 submissions that leverage NIF: NIF4OGGD - NLP
Interchange Format for Open German Governmental Data, N^3 – A Collection
of Datasets for Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation in the NLP
Interchange Format and Global Intelligent Content: Active Curation of
Language Resources using Linked Data as well as an early implementation
of a GATE-based NER/NEL evaluation framework by Dojchinovski and Kliegr.
Further funding for the maintenance, interlinking and publication of
Linguistic Linked Data as well as support and improvements of NIF is
available via the expiring LOD2 EU project, as well as the CSA EU
project called LIDER, which started in November 2013. Based on the
evidence of successful adoption presented in this thesis, we can expect
a decent to high chance of reaching critical mass of Linked Data
technology as well as the NIF standard in the field of Natural Language
Processing and Language Resources.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-157932 |
| Date | 12 January 2015 |
| Creators | Hellmann, Sebastian |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Prof. Dr. Ing. habil. Klaus-Peter Fähnrich, Prof. Dr. Sören Auer, Dr. Jens Lehmann, Prof. Hans Uszkoreit, Prof. Dr. Ing. habil. Klaus-Peter Fähnrich |
| Publisher | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:doctoralThesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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