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Title
Abstract
Figures
Introduction
Background and Motivation
Conclusion
Discussion and Future Work
References

NAF: the NLP Annotation Format Technical Report NWR-2014-3

Profile image of Piek VossenPiek Vossen

Abstract
sparkles

AI

The NLP Annotation Format (NAF) is introduced as a versatile representation scheme for linguistic annotations in natural language processing (NLP) architectures. Grounded in existing standards, it aims to facilitate interoperability among diverse NLP tools while adhering to Linked Data principles. The document outlines NAF's motivation, structural overview, and its application within specific projects such as NewsReader.

Figures (4)
NAF: the NLP Annotation Format The structures presented in the previous section are not RDF representa- tions. As explained above, it is advantageous to also have a variation of NAF that in RDF, because we can take advantage of Semantic Web tech- nologies to extract information from our representations efficiently. Further- more, communication with information represented in RDF (as is the case in the KnowledgeStore in NewsReader) is facilitated when we have represen- tations that represent all linguistic objects as URIs. The examples in the previous section merely assigned IDs that are unique within a specific NAF representation. We want to link specific information in our KnowledgeStore to the specific source(s) of this information in the text using the denotedBy
NAF: the NLP Annotation Format The structures presented in the previous section are not RDF representa- tions. As explained above, it is advantageous to also have a variation of NAF that in RDF, because we can take advantage of Semantic Web tech- nologies to extract information from our representations efficiently. Further- more, communication with information represented in RDF (as is the case in the KnowledgeStore in NewsReader) is facilitated when we have represen- tations that represent all linguistic objects as URIs. The examples in the previous section merely assigned IDs that are unique within a specific NAF representation. We want to link specific information in our KnowledgeStore to the specific source(s) of this information in the text using the denotedBy
NAF: the NLP Annotation Format In standard NAF, the confidence score was an attribute of the externalRe? element. We cannot leave it at this location in NAF-RDF. Whereas we car interpret the confidence attribute any way we like when it is part of a XMI schema, in RDF it becomes an attribute of the external reference. This i incorrect, since the score indicates the confidence of this external referenc being associated with the term and not some confidence score of the referenc itself. This difference points to the most fundamental difference between ¢ general XML schema and RDF: an RDF representation always has a specific interpretation.
NAF: the NLP Annotation Format In standard NAF, the confidence score was an attribute of the externalRe? element. We cannot leave it at this location in NAF-RDF. Whereas we car interpret the confidence attribute any way we like when it is part of a XMI schema, in RDF it becomes an attribute of the external reference. This i incorrect, since the score indicates the confidence of this external referenc being associated with the term and not some confidence score of the referenc itself. This difference points to the most fundamental difference between ¢ general XML schema and RDF: an RDF representation always has a specific interpretation.
Figure 7: The IXA pipeline: the basic architecture for NewsReader
Figure 7: The IXA pipeline: the basic architecture for NewsReader
Figure 8: NewsReader architecture where processes are run in parallel NAF: the NLP Annotation Format
Figure 8: NewsReader architecture where processes are run in parallel NAF: the NLP Annotation Format

Related papers

An Efficient and Flexible Format for Linguistic and Semantic Annotation
Bogdan Sacaleanu

2002

The paper describes an XML annotation format and tool developed within the MUCHMORE project. The annotation scheme was designed specifically for the purposes of Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval in the medical domain so as to allow both efficient and flexible access to layers of information. We use a parallel English-German corpus of medical abstracts and annotate it with linguistic information (tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatisation and decomposition, phrase recognition, grammatical functions) as well as semantic information from various sources. The annotation of medical terms/concepts, semantic types and semantic relations is based on the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Additionally, we use EuroWordNet as a general-language resource in annotating word senses and to compare domain-specific and general language use. A major aim of the project is also to complement existing ontological resources by extracting new terms and new semantic relations. We present the annotation scheme, which is conceptually related to stand-off annotation, and describe our tool for automatic semantic annotation.

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A note on the definition of semantic annotation languages
Chwhynny Overbeeke, Harry Bunt

2009

In the last few years, the international organization for standards ISO has started up various projects concerned with the definition of interoperable concepts for syntactic, morphosyntactic, and semantic annotation, with the ultimate aim to support the development of interoperable language re- sources. The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF, Ide & Romary, 2004) thereby serves as a meta-framework. LAF distinguishes between the con- cepts of annotation and representation: 'annotation' refers to the process of adding information to segments of language data, or to that information itself, independent of the format in which this information is represented. The term 'representation' refers to the format in which an annotation is ren- dered, for instance in XML. According to LAF, annotations are the proper level of standardization. This distinction is reflected in the specification of ISO-TimeML, a pro- posed ISO standard for temporal annotation (ISO, 2008) which co...

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A Generic XML-Based Format for Structured Linguistic Annotation and Its Application to Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0
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CELLAR : A Data Modeling System for Linguistic Annotation
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CELLAR is not a particular annotation schema, but is a system for expressing and building annotation schemas. The paper illustrates how an annotation schema is expressed as an XML document that defines classes of objects, their properties, and the relationships between objects. The schema is then implemented via automatic conversion to a relational database schema and an XML DTD for data import and export. Requirements for Linguistic Data Modeling CELLAR is a data modeling system that was built specifically for the purpose of linguistic annotation. It was designed to model the following five fundamental aspects of the nature of linguistic data: 1. The data in a text unfold sequentially; the data model must therefore be able to represent text in proper sequence. 2. The data are hierarchically structured; the data model must therefore be able to express hierarchical structures of arbitrary depth. 3. The data elements bear information in many simultaneous dimensions; the data model mus...

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Designing Annotation Schemes: From Theory to Model
Annie Zaenen

Handbook of Linguistic Annotation

In this chapter, we describe the method and process of transforming the theoretical formulations of a linguistic phenomenon, based on empirical observations, into a model that can be used for the development of a language annotation specification. We outline this procedure generally, and then examine the steps in detail by specific example. We look at how this methodology has been implemented in the creation of TimeML (and ISO-TimeML), a broad-based standard for annotating temporal information in natural language texts. Because of the scope of this effort and the richness of the theoretical work in the area, the development of TimeML illustrates very clearly the methodology of the early stages of the MATTER annotation cycle, where initial models and schemas cycle through progressively mature versions of the resulting specification. Furthermore, the subsequent effort to convert TimeML into an ISO compliant standard, ISO-TimeML, demonstrates the utility of the CASCADES model in distinguishing between the concrete syntax of the schema and abstract syntax of the model behind it.

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Handbook of Linguistic Annotation
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References (10)

  1. Rodrigo Agerri, Josu Bermudez, and German Rigau. IXA pipeline: Effi- cient and ready to use multilingual NLP tools. In Proceedings of the 9th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC2014), Reykjavik, Iceland, 2014.
  2. Anders Björkelund, Bernd Bohnet, Love Hafdell, and Pierre Nugues. A high-performance syntactic and semantic dependency parser. In Proceed- ings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations, COLING '10, pages 33-36, Stroudsburg, PA, USA, 2010. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  3. Wauter Bosma, Piek Vossen, Aitor Soroa, German Rigau, Maurizio Tesconi, Andrea Marchetti, Monica Monachini, and Carlo Aliprandi. KAF: a generic semantic annotation format. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Generative Approaches to the Lexicon GL 2009, Pisa, Italy, 2009.
  4. Antske Fokkens, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Sara Tonelli, Willem Robert van Hage, Luciano Serafini, Rachele Sprugnoli, and Jesper Hoeksema. GAF: A grounded annotation framework for events. In Proceedings of the first Workshop on Events: Definition, Dectection, Coreference and Representation, Atlanta, USA, 2013.
  5. Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer, and Martin Brümmer. In- tegrating NLP using Linked Data. In Proceedings of the 12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 2013.
  6. Nancy Ide, Laurent Romary, and Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie. Interna- tional standard for a linguistic annotation framework. In Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on Software Engineering and Architecture of Language Technology Systems (SEALTS). Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003.
  7. Frank Manola and Eric Miller, editors. RDF Primer. W3C Recommendation. World Wide Web Consortium, February 2004.
  8. Marie-Francine Moens, Oleksandr Kolomiyets, Emanuele Pianta, Sara Tonelli, and Steven Bethard. D3.1: State-of-the-art and design of novel an- notation languages and technologies: Updated version. Technical report, TERENCE project -ICT FP7 Programme -ICT-2010-25410, 2011. NewsReader: ICT-316404 February 10, 2014 NAF: the NLP Annotation Format 23/23
  9. Ineke Schuurman and Menzo Windhouwer. Explicit semantics for enriched documents. what do ISOcat, RELcat and SCHEMAcat have to offer. In 2nd Supporting Digital Humanities conference (SDH 2011), Copenhagen, 2011.
  10. Menzo Windhouwer. RELcat: a relation registry for isocat data categories. In Proceedings of LREC 2012, pages 3661-3664, 2012.

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We present KAF, the KYOTO Annotation Format. KAF is a layered and extendible linguistic annotation format that is specifically developed to arrive at semantic interoperability. KAF is used in seven languages in several applications throughout the KYOTO (Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization) project. The goal of these applications is to derive semantic data from linguistically processed text. Separate annotation layers are defined for each annotation process but these can be combined to arrive at a higher level of semantic representation. This paper gives an outline of KAF and a description of how it is applied in the KYOTO project.

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Representing linguistic corpora and their annotations
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A Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) is being developed within the International Standards Organization Technical Committee 37 Sub-committee on Language Resource Management (ISO TC37 SC4). LAF is intended to provide a standardized means to represent linguistic data and its annotations that is defined broadly enough to accommodate all types of linguistic annotations, and at the same time provide means to represent precise and potentially complex linguistic information. The general principles informing the design of LAF have been previously reported . This paper describes some of the more technical aspects of the LAF design that have been addressed in the process of finalizing the specifications for the standard.

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