CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Treebanking

Blog post written by Koenraad De Smedt and Jan Hajič, edited by Darja Fišer and Jakob Lenardič

On June 25, 2015, CLARIN recognized a virtual Knowledge Centre for Treebanking operated by a consortium consisting of the following:  

1. the CLARINO Bergen Centre at the University of Bergen, Norway;

2. LINDAT/CLARIN at the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

The aim of the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Treebanking is to provide support to researchers interested in the following:

1. building, depositing, and/or disseminating their treebanks;

2. exploring existing treebanks available at the consortium.

Knowledge is transferred through training events, written documentation, personal advice, hands-on assistance and resource hosting. The members of the consortium offer serviced open platforms for constructing, managing and exploring treebanks. Access to some treebanks is open, while access to other treebanks is restricted to registered users after signing in. Users can be authenticated through

Access to multiple systems by logging in once

at members of the CLARIN Service Provider Federation or of eduGAIN.

The CLARINO Bergen Centre operates INESS (Infrastructure for the Exploration of Syntax and Semantics), an integrated treebanking environment with the following online services:

• accessing, searching and visualizing treebank data in various formats (dependency, constituency, LFG, HPSG);
• building LFG treebanks by parsing and discriminant disambiguation;
• editing dependency treebanks.

Most services can be accessed using a web browser, but uploading treebanks and grammars requires manual support. Currently INESS has more than 200 treebanks available in more than 70 languages.

Written knowledge sharing on the INESS site includes the following:

• a welcome page;
• a page for getting started;
• an overview of the extensive documentation (including walkthrough and documentation of grammar, query language, web interface, annotation and formats);
• a faq (list of frequently asked questions);
• a user forum;
• a list of publications;
• links to related information (including a video and slides from a demo);
• project background.

INESS provided interactive knowledge sharing at the following events:

• Tutorial at the
  Common Language Resources and their Applications
  See: http://clara.uib.no
  Thematic Course on Consolidating and Harmonising Treebank Annotation, Prague, 2010
• INESS Training Workshop, Solstrand, 2013
• INESS Training Workshop for NAOB, Solstrand 2014
• INESS Training Workshop at the ParGram meeting, Warsaw, 2015
• INESS Training Workshop, Solstrand, 2016
• Tutorial on Multiword expression in treebanks at the 2nd PARSEME Training School, La Rochelle, 2016 (with written notes)
• Workshop at MONS, Solstrand, 2017

LINDAT (Prague) offers interactive services to

• deposit treebanks in a repository;
• visualise treebank data using Treex;
• search and visualise the treebanks using PML-TQ;
• search treebanks using Kontext.

Written knowledge sharing at LINDAT includes the following:

• a step by step guide for depositing resources;
• a faq (list of frequently asked questions);
• a user forum.

Until now, the user forums at the Knowledge Centre have been little used, but the organized events mentioned above have been well attended. Knowledge transfer through personal contact with experts at the Knowledge Centre has proved important for projects aiming at curation of their resources.

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