ZAP: An Open-Source Multilingual Annotation Projection Framework

Alan Akbik, Roland Vollgraf

Abstract: Previous work leveraged annotation projection as a convenient method to automatically generate linguistic resources such as treebanks or propbanks for new languages. This approach automatically transfers linguistic annotation from a resource-rich source language (SL) to translations in a target language (TL). However, to the best of our knowledge, no publicly available framework for this approach currently exists, limiting researchers’ ability to reproduce and compare experiments. In this paper, we present ZAP, the first open-source framework for annotation projection in parallel corpora. Our framework is Java-based and includes methods for preprocessing corpora, computing word-alignments between sentence pairs, transferring different layers of linguistic annotation, and visualization. The framework was designed for ease-of-use with lightweight APIs. We give an overview of ZAP and illustrate its usage.