Corpora: Final programme workshop on Distributing and Accessing

Wim Peters (W.Peters@dcs.shef.ac.uk)
Wed, 20 May 1998 16:08:16 +0100

***********************************************
Distributing and Accessing Linguistic Resources
***********************************************

May 27th,

This workshop is part of First International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation at the University of Granada, May 26th to 30th 1998 (see
http://ceres.ugr.es/~rubio/elra.html
for details and how to register).

The workshop will discuss ways to increase the efficacy of linguistic
resource distribution and programmatic access, and work towards the
definition of a new method for these tasks based on distributed processing
and object-oriented modelling with deployment on the WWW.
The workshop will take place in the afternoon after the
scheduled lunch break (13.20 - 14.40).

Organizers: Yorick Wilks, Wim Peters, Hamish Cunningham, Remi Zajac

PAPERS

Presentations are 15 minutes each with 5 minutes for discussion.

14.45 - 15.05
Distributed Thesaurus Storage and Access in a Cultural Domain Application
S. Boutsis, B. Georgantopoulos, S. Piperidis
Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens

15.05 - 15.25
A New Model for Language Resource Access and Distribution
W. Peters, H. Cunningham, Y. Wilks, C. McCauley
University of Sheffield

15.25 - 15.45
Reuse and Integration of NLP Components in the Calypso Architecture
R. Zajac
New Mexico State University

15.45 - 16.05
Corpus-based Research using the Internet
H. Brugman, A. Russel, P. Wittenburg, R. Piepenbrock
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

16.05 - 16.30 The CUE Corpus Access Tool
O. Mason
University of Birmingham

16.30 - 17.00 COFFEE BREAK

17.00 - 17.20
Linguistic Research Utilizing the EDR Electronic Dictionary as a
Linguistic Resource
T. Ogino
EDR, Japan

17.20 - 19.00 (room available until 20.00)
PANEL DISCUSSION: Distributing and Accessing Linguistic Resources

The panel participants are:
Khalid Choukri, Eduard Hovy, Judith Klavans, Yorick Wilks, and
Antonio Zampolli.

14.00 - 14.45 and 16.30 - 17.00 POSTER PRESENTATIONS

The presentation of the posters will happen in 2 sessions, at the end of
lunch and during afternoon coffee.
The posters will also be on display during the workshop.

TRACTOR: TELRI Research Archive of Computational Tools and Resources
R. Krishnamurthy
University of Birmingham

Web-Surfing the Lexicon
D. Cabrero, M. Vilares, L. Docampo, S. Sotelo
Ramon Pineiro Research Centre/Universities of Coruna and Santiago

Exploring Distributed MT
O. Streiter, A. Schmidt-Wigger, U. Reuther, C. Pease
IAI Saarbruecken

A Proposal for an On-line Lexical Database
P. Cassidy
Micra, Inc.

Workshop scope and aims
-----------------------

In general the reuse of of NLP data resources (such as lexicons or corpora)
has exceeded that of algorithmic resources (such as lemmatisers or parsers).
However, there are still two barriers to data resource reuse:

1) each resource has its own representation syntax and corresponding
programmatic access mode (e.g. SQL for CELEX, C or Prolog for Wordnet,
SGML for the BNC);

2) resources must generally be installed locally to be usable (and of
course precisely how this happens, what operating systems are supported
etc. varies from case to case).

The consequences of 1) are that although resources share some structure in
common (lexicons are organised around words, for example) this commonality
is wasted when it comes to using a new resource (the developer has to learn
everything afresh each time) and that work which seeks to investigate or
exploit commonalities between resources (e.g. to link several lexicons to an
ontology) has to first build a layer of access routines on top of each
resources. So, for example, if we wish to do task-based evaluation of lexicons
by measuring the relative performance of an information extraction system
with different instantiations of lexical resource, we might end up writing
code to translate several different resources into SQL or SGML.

The consequence of 2) is that there is no way to "try before you buy": no
way to examine a data resource for its suitability for your needs before
licencing it. Correspondingly there is no way for a resource provider to
expose limitted access to their products for advertising purposes, or gain
revenue through piecemeal supply of sections of a resource.

This workshop will discuss ways to overcome these barriers. The proposers
will discuss a new method for distributing and accessing language resources
involving the development of a common programmatic model of the various
resources types, implemented in CORBA IDL and/or Java, along with a
distributed server for non-local access. This model is being designed as
part of the GATE project (General Architecture for Text Engineering:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/groups/nlp/gate/) and goes under the
provisional title of an Active CREOLE Server. (CREOLE: Collection of REusable
Objects for Language Engineering. Currently CREOLE supports only algortihmic
objects, but will be extended to data objects.)

A common model of language data resources would be a set of
inheritance hierarchies making up a forest or set of graphs. At
the top of the hierarchies would be very general abstractions
from resources (e.g. lexicons are about words); at the leaves
would be data items that were specific to individual resources.
Programmatic access would be available at all levels, allowing
the developer to select an appropriate level of commonality for
each application.

Note that although an exciting element of the work could be to
provide algorithms to dynamically merge common resources what
we're suggesting initially is not to develop anything
substantively new, but simply to improve access to existing
resources. This is NOT a new standards initiative, but a way to
build on previous initiatives.

Of course, the production of a common model that fully expressed all the
subtleties of all resources would be a large undertaking, but we believe
that it can be done incrementally, with useful results at each stage. Early
versions will stop decomposing the object structure of resources at a fairly
high level, leaving the developer to handle the data structures native to
the resources at the leaves of the forest. There should still be a
substantial benefit in uniform access to higher level strucures.

Program Committee
-----------------

Yorick Wilks
Hamish Cunningham
Wim Peters
Remi Zajac
Roberta Catizone
Paola Velardi
Maria Teresa Pazienza
Roberto Basili
Bran Boguraev
Sergei Nirenburg
James Pustejowsky
Ralph Grishman
Christiane Fellbaum