Preface to the Proceedings of the Poster Session of LDK 2019

This volume presents the proceedings of the poster session of the 2nd Conference on
Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019) held in Leipzig, Germany, May 20–23, 2019.
This poster session was a novel feature for LDK, calling for short abstracts on latest
developments to be presented in an interactive fashion during the conference.

LDK is a bi-annual conference series on matters of human language technology, data
science, and knowledge representation, initiated in 2017 by a consortium of researchers
from the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the National University of Ireland, Galway
(Ireland), the Institut für Angewandte Informatik (InfAI) at the University of Leipzig
(Germany), and the Applied Computational Linguistics Lab (ACoLi) at Goethe University
Frankfurt am Main (Germany), and it has been supported by an international Scientific
Committee of leading researchers in Natural Language Processing, Linked Data and
Semantic Web, Language Resources and Digital Humanities.

The second edition of the LDK conference was hosted by the Institut für Angewandte
Informatik (InfAI) in Leipzig, Germany and co-organized by the Insight Centre for Data
Analytics and the Applied Computational Linguistics Lab (ACoLi). Major Sponsors were the
LiLa: Linking Latin project, the CID GmbH in Germany, the Semantic Web Company, and
Pret-a-LLOD. Ready-to-use Multilingual Linked Language Data for Knowledge Services
across Sectors funded under the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation
programme under grant agreement No. 825182. LDK 2019 has received further
endorsement from the DBpedia Association, from the European Lexicographic
Infrastructure (ELEXIS) project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 731015, and from the independent
research group Linked Open Dictionaries (LiODi) funded by the German Federal Ministry
of Education and Research (BMBF).

In a biennial cycle, LDK conferences aim at bringing together researchers from across
disciplines concerned with the acquisition, curation and use of language data in the
context of data science and knowledge-based applications. With the advent of the Web
and digital technologies, an ever increasing amount of language data is now available
across application areas and industry sectors, including social media, digital archives,
company records, etc. The efficient and meaningful exploitation of this data in scientific
and commercial innovation is at the core of data science research, employing natural
language processing and machine learning methods as well as semantic technologies and
knowledge graphs. Language data is of increasing importance to machine learning-based
approaches in Human Language Technologies, Linked Data and Semantic Web research
and applications that depend on linguistic and semantic annotation with lexical,
terminological and ontological resources, manual alignment across language or other
human-assigned labels. The acquisition, provenance, representation, maintenance,
usability, quality as well as legal, organizational and infrastructure aspects of language
data are therefore rapidly becoming major areas of research that are at the focus of the
conference.

Knowledge graphs is an active field of research concerned with the extraction, integration,
maintenance and use of semantic representations of language data in combination with
semantically or otherwise structured data, numerical data and multimodal data among
others. Knowledge graph research builds on the exploitation and extension of lexical,
terminological and ontological resources, information and knowledge extraction, entity
linking, ontology learning, ontology alignment, semantic text similarity, Linked Data and
other Semantic Web technologies. The construction and use of knowledge graphs from
language data, possibly and ideally in the context of other types of data, is a further
specific focus of the conference. See “http://www.dagstuhl.de/dagpub/978-3-95977-105-4”
for the proceedings of the LDK conference.

In total, 12 abstracts were submitted to the poster track, each reviewed by 3 reviewers. 9
abstracts were accepted and are included in these proceedings, in an extended form.
During the poster session, the contribution “Representing Arabic Lexicons in Lemon – a
Preliminary Study”, by Mustafa Jarrar, Hamzeh Amayreh and John P. McCrae was
selected by the participants as the best poster.

We would like to thank the reviewers for their contribution to this successful event.

Thierry Declerck and John P. McCrae