1. TextCrowd – Collaborative semantic enrichment of text-based datasets
Kathrin Beck (MPG/MPCDF)
EOSC Service Provider Workshop
2017/09/13, Pisa

2. Agenda Introduction & aims of TextCrowd
Progress report and current status
Challenges
Further work
Success criteria
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

3. TextCrowd team
Franco Niccolucci, Achille Felicetti (PIN / Florence Univ.)
Kathrin Beck, Thomas Zastrow (MPG/MPCDF; shepherds)
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

4. Introduction
Fragmented research landscape in the Social Sciences and Humanities
EOSC: structure and integrate initiatives such as CLARIN, DARIAH and E-RIHS ERICs, and Digital Humanities Organizations (e.g. their Association ADHO)
Offer advanced text-based services addressing common research needs.
Benefit for many scientists in the long-tail even if delivering such a service presents real challenges around interoperability and multilingualism.
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

5. Introduction TextCrowd
Cultural heritage and humanities datasets are largely based on texts:
Reports
Archaeology: excavations, surveys
Conservation: diagnosis, restoration – often mixed with numeric results
Grey literature
Literary/historical sources
Research articles
Monographs
Aim:
Linguistic annotated texts
Machine learning models for natural language processing (NLP) tool chains
Automatic annotation and information extraction via NLP tools
Size: the demonstrator will work with data in the range of megabytes, later extensible up to 2 million files
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

6. Progress report & current status
Named Entity (NE) categories:
Artefact
Colour
Material
Time period
Person
Place
Site
Timespan
Technique
Target output formats / ontologies:
RDF (Resource Description Framework, by W3C)
CIDOC CRM (ICOM's International Committee for Documentation – Conceptual Reference Model, by World Museum Community)
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

7. GATE pipeline (desktop)
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

8. NLP Tools GATE toolchain (https://gate.ac.uk/)
GATE pipeline has been refined and further developed:
importing vocabularies and some pre-processing of their content
replacing the Italian OpenNLP with FP7 project OpeNER components via web service calls from GATE, with resulting improvement in NER discovery
OpeNER: neuronal network instead of OpenNLP maximum entropy model
checking OpeNER outcomes
refining stemming/lemmatization components
developing part of speech (POS) rules for filtering on nouns when annotating
specialised timespan and period component with pattern based rules.
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

9. GATE tools (desktop)
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

10. D4Science VRE Operated and maintained by CNR-ISTI on the D4Science VRE
Workflow engine with GATE pipeline, operated as RESTstyle web services (running in Sheffield)
Intuitive, web based user interface
User management
Storage (private and shared files)
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

11. D4Science Dashboard
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

12. Storage
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

13. Pipeline
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

14. Challenges
No annotated text corpora as training data for machine learning algorithms available
Manual annotation of 400 pages of Italian archaeology reports in progress (current status: 200 pages of annotation)
No user friendly Cloud-based environment available
Desktop GATE pipeline migrated into D4Science
AAI issues
The pilot focuses on freely available texts
User management within D4Science
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

15. Further Work Finishing the manual annotation of training text corpora
Training of machine-learning based NE applications
Integration of the improved OpeNER recogniser into the D4Science GATE pipeline
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

16. Success criteria Creation of a text corpus for annotation
When is it big enough? When is the output good enough, and which text types are most relevant?  focus on reasonable quality for most common text types in contemporary Italian
Interoperability of tool pipeline
GATE offers all necessary tools, except for Italian NER  interoperability provided by GATE developers
Interoperability between TextCrowd’s toolchain and other SSH workflow system like WebLicht (  not a focus now
Performance enhancements
User-friendly Cloud-based named entity recognition (NER) workflow for Italian archaeologists
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017

17. Thank you for your attention! Any questions?
EOSCpilot workshop, Pisa
13/09/2017