Corpus Query Lingua Franca part II: Ontology

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3346–3352 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3346 Corpus Query Lingua Franca part II: Ontology Stefan Evert​1​, Oleg Harlamov​1​, Philipp Heinrich​1​, Piotr Bański​2 1​Lehrstuhl für Korpus- und Computerlinguistik Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg 2​Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim {stefan.evert,oleg.harlamov,philipp.heinrich}@fau.de banski@ids-mannheim.de Abstract The present paper outlines the projected second part of the Corpus Query Lingua Franca (CQLF) family of standards: CQLF Ontology, which is currently in the process of standardization at the International Standards Organization (ISO), in its Technical Committee 37, Subcommittee 4 (TC37SC4) and its national mirrors. The first part of the family, ISO 24623-1 (henceforth CQLF Metamodel), was successfully adopted as an international standard at the beginning of 2018. The present paper reflects the state of the CQLF Ontology at the moment of submission for the Committee Draft ballot. We provide a brief overview of the CQLF Metamodel, present the assumptions and aims of the CQLF Ontology, its basic structure, and its potential extended applications. The full ontology is expected to emerge from a community process, starting from an initial version created by the authors of the present paper. Keywords:​ CQLF, query languages, standardization, ISO, corpus 1. Introduction In the past 30 years, the “corpus revolution” has yielded a wide variety of language corpora designed to fulfill a myriad of research purposes, some of which were not even foreseen at the time of creation. In order to satisfy specific information needs of the current and future users of these corpora, corpus query languages (CQLs) have been and will be created. While, at first sight, CQLs vary to a nearly unlimited extent, commonalities may easily be identified, both from the point of view of the corpus data models that they target and from the point of view of information needs that users may have. The CQLF standard family aims at capturing the commonalities while at the same time defining and circumscribing the matrix of potential variation among CQLs. The existence of a large number of different corpus query languages poses an epistemic challenge for the research community, since (1) different CQLs have to be learned in order to be able to address specific information needs, and (2) some language resources are in practice only accessible through corpus management systems that feature only a single CQL (cf. Bański et al., 2016). We are thus in need of better interoperability across corpus query systems, realized – in one approach – by abstracting away from individual CQLs to see how far their queries can be compared or even transferred between the various corpus analysis platforms. The present paper describes the second part of the Corpus Query ​Lingua Franca (CQLF) family of standards. CQLF aims, inter alia, at facilitating the comparison of the properties of different corpus query languages. It is meant to provide a common reference taxonomy based on “a consistent, stable and highly expressive set of category labels” (Smith, 2004: 34) following conventionally ac- cepted …

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