Formal Data Structures for Tabular Formats in Language Technology

Christian Chiarcos, Maxim Ionov, Luis Glaser, Christian Fäth

Keywords: language technology, data models, CoNLL-RDF, ontology

TL;DR: We present an ontology that allows machine-readable description of tabular data formats that are widely used for natural language processing

Abstract: In language technology and the language sciences, tabular formats with tab-separated values (TSV) represent a frequently used formalism to represent linguistically annotated natural language, often addressed as “CoNLL formats”. To facilitate interoperability between them, the CoNLL-RDF ontology provides a machine-readable description of 24 such formats that can be used for the conversion between the respective TSV formats and the automated assessment of conversion quality and gaps.