[open-linguistics] ANN: NLP Interchange Format (NIF) 1.0 Spec, Demo and Reference Implementation

[Emily M. Bender]

Dear Sebastian,

How does NIF relate to/compare to GrAF?

Emily

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 11:34 PM, Sebastian Hellmann
<hellmann at informatik.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:
> The Natural Language Processing 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 of NIF
> consists of a vocabulary, which can represent Strings as RDF resources. A
> special URI Design is used to pinpoint annotations to a part of a document.
> These URIs can then be used to attach arbitrary annotations to the
> respective character sequence. Employing these URIs, annotations can be
> published on the Web as Linked Data and interchanged between different NLP
> tools and applications.
>
> In order to simplify the combination of tools, improve their
> interoperability and facilitating the use of Linked Data we developed the
> NLP Interchange Format (NIF). NIF addresses the interoperability problem on
> three layers: the structural, conceptual and access layer. NIF is based on a
> Linked Data enabled URI scheme for identifying elements in (hyper-) texts
> (structural layer) and a comprehensive ontology for describing common NLP
> terms and concepts (conceptual layer). NIF-aware applications will produce
> output (and possibly also consume input) adhering to the NIF ontology as
> REST services (access layer). Other than more centralized solutions such as
> UIMA and GATE, NIF enables the creation of heterogeneous, distributed and
> loosely coupled NLP applications, which use the Web as an integration
> platform. Another benefit is, that a NIF wrapper has to be only created once
> for a particular tool, but enables the tool to interoperate with a
> potentially large number of other
> tools without additional adaptations. Ultimately, we envision an ecosystem
> of NLP tools and services to emerge using NIF for exchanging and integrating
> rich annotations.
>
> We designed NIF to be very light-weight and to reduce the amount of triples
> to achieve better scalability. The following triples in N3 Syntax express
> that the string “W3C” on http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
> (index 22849 to 22852) is linked to the DBpedia resource of
> “World_Wide_Web_Consortium”:
>
> @prefix ld: <http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html#> .
> @prefix str: <http://nlp2rdf.lod2.eu/schema/string/> .
> @prefix dbo: <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/> .
> @prefix scms: <http://ns.aksw.org/scms/> .
> @prefix nerd: <http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology#> .
> ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C str:anchorOf "W3C" .
> ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C scms:means dbpedia:World_Wide_Web_Consortium .
> ld:offset_22849_22852_W3C a dbo:Organisation , nerd:Organization .
>
> NIF already incorporates the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA,
> http://nachhalt.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/owl/) and the Named Entity Recognition
> and Disambiguation (NERD, http://nerd.eurecom.fr/ontology/) ontology. Please
> get in contact, if you know of further NLP ontologies, which we can reuse
> and integrate in NIF.
>
> This release consists of the following items:
> 1. The specification of NIF 1.0 ( http://nlp2rdf.org/nif-1-0 ) This document
> will guide the further implementation of NIF-enabled services. An average
> wrapper requires around 200-500 lines of code. The spec integrates several
> domain ontologies (OLiA, NERD) and will be extended in the future to cover
> more domains.
> 2. A community portal ( http://nlp2rdf.org )
> -- mailing list (nlp2rdf at lists.informatik.uni-leipzig.de ) -
> http://lists.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/mailman/listinfo/nlp2rdf
> -- Read how to get involved (http://nlp2rdf.org/get-involved )
> 3. A reference implementations of NIF 1.0 in Java
> -- Release 1.2 (
> http://code.google.com/p/nlp2rdf/downloads/detail?name=nlp2rdf-1.2.tar.gz )
> -- Source code ( http://code.google.com/p/nlp2rdf/ )
> 4. Wrapper implementations for Stanford CoreNLP, SnowballStemmer, OpenNLP,
> MontyLingua, DBpedia Spotlight, UIMA, Gate (for ANNIE and also generic
> output), Mallet (alpha)
> -- Demo GUI (with links to implementations): http://nlp2rdf.lod2.eu/demo.php
> -- List of implementations: http://nlp2rdf.org/implementations
> 5. Tutorials and Tutorial Challenges (
> http://nlp2rdf.org/tutorials-challenge )
> -- Tutorial: How to call a NIF web service with your favorite SemWeb library
> -
> http://nlp2rdf.org/tutorials/tutorial-how-to-call-a-nif-webservice-with-your-favorite-semweb-library
> -- Tutorial Challenge: Semantic Search -
> http://nlp2rdf.org/tutorial-challenges/tutorial-challenge-semantic-search/
> -- Tutorial Challenge: Multilingual Part-Of-Speech Tagger -
> http://nlp2rdf.org/tutorial-challenges/tutorial-challenge-multilingual-part-of-speech-tagger
> -- Tutorial Challenge: Semantic Yellow Pages -
> http://nlp2rdf.org/tutorial-challenges/tutorial-challenge-semantic-yellow-pages
> 6. Slides - http://www.slideshare.net/kurzum/nif-version-10
> 7. A technical report http://svn.aksw.org/papers/2012/WWW_NIF/public.pdf
> including some evaluation.
>
> We would like to thank our colleagues from AKSW (http://aksw.org) research
> group and the LOD2 (http://lod2.eu) project for their helpful comments and
> inspiring discussions during the development of NIF. Especially, we would
> like to thank Christian Chiarcos
> (http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/~chiarcos/) for his support while using
> OLiA, the members of the Working Group on Open Data in Linguistics
> (http://linguistics.okfn.org/) and the students that participated in the NIF
> field study: Markus Ackermann, Martin Brümmer, Didier Cherix, Marcus
> Nitzschke, Robert Schulze.
>
> Regards,
> Sebastian Hellmann, Jens Lehmann and Sören Auer
>
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>



-- 
Emily M. Bender
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
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