This paper introduces the FREME project, a new Horizon 2020 innovation action. It aims at building an open framework of e-Services for multilingual and semantic enrichment of digital content, based on a reusable set of open Application Programme Interfaces and Graphical User Interfaces to FREME enrichment services. In addition, the paper discusses how the project deploys Linguistic Linked Data (LLD), especially existing LLD resources, LLD best practices and the LLD reference architecture.
The growing amount of digital content across languages, sectors and domains leads to both challenges and business opportunities for many industries. Linked data (LD) and language technology (LT) solutions exist, providing e.g. machine translation, entity recognition, or multilingual linked data sets. These solutions face several issues, e.g.: a plethora of content formats to process; adaptability and “silo solution” dependency; and usability in an industry application scenario: the lack of adequate tooling for a given or new group of user types (authors, translators, data wranglers or scientists etc.) in selected business scenarios.
The FREME framework addresses these issues by providing a reusable set of open Application Programme Interfaces and Graphical User Interfaces to FREME enrichment services. In this way, the project will improve the existing processes of digital content management. The improvement will go through the whole content value chain: content creation (or authoring), content translation/localization, publishing and access to content including cross-language sharing and personalized content recommendations. Thus, the goal is to open new opportunities for all sectors that are involved in digital content management.
The main goal is to provide a set of interfaces for enrichment of digital content. We understand digital content as any type of content that exists in a digital form (text, video, audio, images, and others). Digital content is stored in various formats, for example, textual content can be stored in structured formats (e.g. using the linked data technology stack) and unstructured formats (using e.g. PDF, PPTX etc.). The share of unstructured representation of digital content still prevails to a great extent. We will work with the textual type of digital content in its structured and unstructured formats. We aim at transforming unstructured content into its structured representation. Enrichment services. By enrichment we understand annotation of content with additional information. Content can be enriched on any step of its value chain that makes it intelligent, i.e., discoverable, interoperable, and aggregatable further on. Multilingual enrichment. Under multilingual enrichment we understand annotation of content with additional linguistic information in a language or languages other than the language of content itself. The following languages of the project partners and / or their customers are in focus: English, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian.
Semantic enrichment. Under semantic enrichment we understand annotation of content with additional information that transforms unstructured content into its structured representation. Semantic enrichment deploys the semantic richness provided by linked open vocabularies, as well as data sources that are not (yet) available as linked data.
In FREME, enrichment information is stored in two ways: first, as information using
the Natural Language Processing Interchange Format (NIF), see
Second, FREME allows storing information inside the enriched content itself. The approach for storing the information then depends on the format in question. E.g. in the case of HTML5 and XML, the project relies on the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0, see http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/ .
The FREME framework will develop and integrate e-Services based on existing and mature technologies. By e-Services we understand in most cases RESTful webservices and graphical user interfaces. Details for each of the six e-Services will be provided below. The framework is designed in an extensible manner, so that both project partners as well as external partners are able to add more services. e-Translation is based on cloud machine translation services for building custom machine translation systems. The service takes content to be translated and the source + target language parameters as input. e-Terminology: is based on cloud terminology services for terminology management and terminology annotation. The service takes content as input and enriches the content with information from terminology data bases. e-Entity is based on entity recognition and existing linked entity datasets. The service takes content as input and enriches it with information related to entities (e.g. names of persons, places, etc.). e-Internationalization is not a web service but the ability of other e-services to handle Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 so called “data categories”: these are metadata items for handling the multilingual content production cycle. For example, the “Translate” data category specifies whether a given piece of content should be translated or not. This is of relevance e.g. for the e-Translation service. The “Terminology” data category provides a standardized way to store the output of eTerminology as part of a NIF representation or in content formats. The “Text Analysis” data category allows storing the output of e-Entity. e-Link is based on NIF and various (linked open) data sets. e-Link receives NIF documents (with annotated entities) and performs enrichment relying on the data sets. An example usage would be: have a NIF document with the entity “Berlin” annotated, and enrich it with information from DBpedia about the current population of Berlin. The difference to querying linked data directly via SPARQL is that the e-Link query approach uses a query template mechanism. It hides the details of the actual query. The user of e-Link just has to provide parameters to the template. In the above example we assume a template called “query the population of a given place”. The identifier for the place (e.g. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin) is a parameter. The template based approach replies to the needs of business case partners. It enables them to enrich digital content with information from data sources without having to become linked data experts. During configuration of e-Link, these experts set up the templates for a given application. e-Publishing has two aspects. First, it is a cloud based content authoring environment, allowing content authors to deal with e-Services in a WYSIWYG manner. Second, e-Publishing is a web service. Input is digital content in various forms (e.g. plain text, HTML). Output is content made available in the EPUB 3 format, see http://idpf.org/epub/30 . We use EPUB 3 since it is the standardised format for representing digital book content. e-Services can be deployed independently of each other. In addition, some e-Services can benefit from processing the enrichment information created via other e-Services. This will be made possible by using NIF as the format for storing and pipelining enrichment information. Example chains of e-Services that are of interest for business case partners (as of writing) are e.g.: • e-Entity, e-Link • e-Entity, e-Link, e-Translate • e-Entity, e-Link, e-Translation, e-Publishing • e-Entity, e-Link, e-Terminology The framework will not hard wire these chains. Processing and then storing the enrichment information using NIF will enable these and other chains. NIF will then be both input and output of e-Services.
The innovation, robustness and usability of the FREME framework of e-Services will be shaped by the four FREME real world business cases.
eBooks. For publishing companies, digital content itself is exploding and is loosing value. Via the project partner iMinds, we will build the e-Services so that they provide additional value, going beyond digital publications. Initial discussions hint that enhanced search engine optimisation via FREME e-Services could be an attractive FREME application scenario for many publishing companies.
BC 2: Translation and Localisation. In the translation and localisation industry, demand for translation and the need for speed and quality are increasing. At the same time prices being paid are going down. Via the project partner VistaTEC, FREME will allow for integrating enrichment functionalities in localisation workflows. The outcome will enable localisation companies to provide value beyond translation, e.g. by adding information from linked (open) data sources via e-Link to translated content.
BC 3 Agriculture and food metadata. In the area of public sector information, the discovery of data often is difficult due to missing multilingual metadata. E.g. many metadata items in the agriculture area are not in the language of the person who wants to use the metadata for search. Via the project partner Agro-know, a key player in the agriculture and food data domain, FREME will tackle this challenge. The eTranslation service will allow for (metadata) automated translation and in this way will foster cross-language, public information access.
BC 4 Web site personalisation. Web site personalisation is a field with many emerging solutions and companies. Currently many solutions focus on English speaking markets. Via the project partner Wripl, FREME will demonstrate how to deploy underlying technologies e.g. via e-Entity in a larger number of languages, enabling SMEs and start-ups to reach out to global markets.
The data value chains that will be built with FREME rely heavily on linguistic linked data sets (LLD). The LIDER project is crucial in providing the basis for a linguistic linked data cloud1. LIDER fosters LLD as a basis for content analytics tasks of unstructured multilingual cross-media content. The e-Services, especially e-Entity, eLink and E-Terminology, can be seen as prototypical examples of content analytics tasks. By providing these services together with e-Translation and several metadata items relevant for translation workflow information (via e-Internationalisation), FREME provides a technology stack that spans across content analytics and machine translation technologies.
The relevance of LIDER work on LLD can be seen in three areas: creation of LLD data sets, best practices on multilingual linguistic linked data, and deployment of the LIDER reference architecture.
Data sets are relevant for FREME in two ways. First, as content to be enriched via FREME. These data sets mostly come from business case partners and are specific to their needs and customers. Second, data sets to be used in enrichment e-Services. Here, figure 2 provides an overview of relevant data sets. 1 See the LIDER homepage at http://lider-project.eu/ and an overview of the LLD at http://linguistic-lod.org/llod-cloud .
Data set DBpedia
Data type Linked Data (RDF)
Data volume 500GB RDF data
Sector Multi-domain
Language 119 NIF (RDF) 100k sentences total
NLP
mostly EN e-Entity About 3.2 M terms About 7 K concepts 32 K concepts 2 billion triples
Multi-domain Multi-domain Agriculture and food safety
Geography 180GB web crawl
Multi-domain mostly EN e-Entity Not all data sets are linguistic linked data sets. E.g. the LetsMT! parallel corpora are not represented in RDF. Some of the data sets are moving towards the linguistic linked data cloud and will be made available via FREME as linked data in the technical sense, e.g. the terminological resource TaaS database.
Initial discussions in the project have shown that in some cases a non-linked data representation of linguistic resources with a clear path towards linked data (e.g. by providing URIs for all data items) is the preferable approach for technical reasons. For example, tooling for machine translation training or for training of statistical named entity recognition currently is far more efficient relying on non-linked data representations. On the other hand, for exchanging data sets and for enriching them with additional information, linked data representations are the more adequate approach.
Similar lessons have been learned in the FALCON project, see http://falcon-project.eu/ , with a focus on using LLD in translation and localisation workflows. In FREME we will take a similar approach, driven by tooling available in the four business cases. An additional goal then is to make this tooling linguistic linked data aware, e.g. providing linked data enabled machine translation systems.
As discussed in the previous section, many data sets are not yet available as linguistic linked data. The LIDER project is working on best practises for creating LLD. This endeavour is undertaken under the helm of the W3C “Best Practises for Multilingual Linked Open Data” (BPMLOD) community group. As of writing, three best practises have been drafted; see http://bpmlod.github.io/report/ for details. • General Patterns: a set of common practices and patterns that can be applied to publish linked data in a multilingual context. • Guidelines for creating bilingual dictionaries. • Guidelines for creating multilingual dictionaries.
All of these best practices are relevant for FREME partners. The business case
partners have their own data sets that they want to deploy in e-Services. In e-Translation,
data sets can be used to provide translations for given lexical items. Currently there is
a plethora of formats for such data sets. As part of deploying the best practices, we
will rely on LEMON to representing bilingual and multilingual dictionaries.
BabelNet, see
For the conversion of LLD resources, off-the-shelf tooling is crucial. In the realm of the BPMLOD group, a TBX2RDF converter has been created. This implementation will help FREME to tackle conversion tasks, e.g. for the forehand mentioned TaaS database. In addition, it demonstrates the best practice of using the LEMON model for representing terminological resources as linguistic linked data.
Within the LIDER project, a reference architecture for working with linguistic linked data has been created, cf. Koidl et al. (2014), esp. section 4.2. FREME instantiates several parts of the architecture. e-Services as LLD aware services. By using NIF as the interchange format between e-Services, FREME provides e-Services as LLD aware services. In the terminology of the reference architecture the e-Services allow to constitute LLD based workflows. LLD publishing via e-Link. The forehand described conversion of TBX to RDF is a publication of non LLD resources as LLD. It realises the best practices (see section 4.2) and relies on migrators like the forehand mentioned TBX2RDF convertor.
Services via FREME is an example of linked data service composition. The eServices are LLD aware: both service workflow input/output and the actual interfaces comply to linked data standards and best practices. The current approach in FREME does not foresee a declarative description for composing services. This is left to the software client using the e-Services.
We connect to the LIDER reference architecture for two reasons. First, it eases the task of knowledge and technology transfer. Via the architecture, several FREME partners learn more easily how to build linguistic linked data enabled applications. Second, the reference architecture can also be seen as providing input to standardisation activities within W3C or other organisations. The W3C LD4LT community group serves as a forum also for LIDER and now also FREME to discuss this and other potential standardisation tasks. In a long term the e-Services may become the basis for standardised processing of both data and language technologies on the Web. But this is not a main work item of FREME.
This paper introduced the FREME project: its motivation and goals, the outline of eServices, and the four business cases. We then discussed the role of linguistic linked data for FREME, including existing data sets, best practices and tooling for new data sets, and the LIDER reference architecture for working with linguistic linked data. As of writing, early prototypes of e-Services are available. The e-Services are being developed in an agile manner, taking feedback from the four business cases into account. Next steps will be including this feedback. A special focus that relates to the topic of this paper is linguistic linked data sources. FREME is looking for working with data set providers who could make their data set available via the e-Services, data set users who want to use LLD for multilingual and semantic enrichment, and providers of multilingual and semantic technologies. The last group could benefit from FREME by making components available for a larger audience, crossing the realms of data and language technologies as well as several industry sectors.