Kiril Simov

Nikolay Paev, Kiril Simov, Petya Osenova. Proceedings of the 13th Global Wordnet Conference. 2025.

The paper presents the results of the ParlaMint II project, which comprise comparable corpora of parliamentary debates of 29 European countries and autonomous regions, covering at least the period from 2015 to 2022, and containing over 1 billion words. The corpora are uniformly encoded, contain rich metadata about their 24 thousand speakers, and are linguistically annotated up to the level of Universal Dependencies syntax and named entities. The paper focuses on the enhancement made since the ParlaMint I project and presents the compilation of the corpora, including the encoding infrastructure, use of GitHub, the production of individual corpora, the common pipeline for producing their distribution, and use of CLARIN services for dissemination. It then gives a quantitative overview of the produced corpora, followed by the qualitative additions made within the ParlaMint II project, namely metadata localisation, the addition of new metadata, such as the political orientation of political parties, the machine translation of the corpora to English and its tagging with semantic classes, and the production of pilot speech corpora. Finally, outreach activities and further work are discussed.

CLARIN is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium developing and providing a federated and interoperable platform to support scientists in the field of the Social Sciences and Humanities in carrying-out language-related research. This contribution provides an overview of the entire infrastructure with a particular focus on tool interoperability, ease of access to research data, tools and services, the importance of sharing knowledge within and across (national) communities, and community building. By taking into account FAIR principles from the very beginning, CLARIN succeeded in becoming a successful example of a research infrastructure that is actively used by its members. The benefits CLARIN members reap from their infrastructure secure a future for their common good that is both sustainable and attractive to partners beyond the original target groups.

This paper presents the ParlaMint corpora containing transcriptions of the sessions of the 17 European national parliaments with half a billion words. The corpora are uniformly encoded, contain rich meta-data about 11 thousand speakers, and are linguistically annotated following the Universal Dependencies formalism and with named entities. Samples of the corpora and conversion scripts are available from the project’s GitHub repository, and the complete corpora are openly available via the CLARIN.SI repository for download, as well as through the NoSketch Engine and KonText concordancers and the Parlameter interface for on-line exploration and analysis.

In 2017, the National Library “Ivan Vazov”–Plovdiv, embarked on a digitalization project whose ultimate purpose is to provide both learners and scholars with several types of content, including periodicals and books published during the late Bulgarian National Revival and afterwards, in the decades before the communist era (1870s-1940s). We focus on the technical aspects of the digitalization project that involves optical character recognition (OCR) and requires proper handling of Cyrillic texts. The paper provides insight into the library’s joint activities with its partners from the Institute of Information and Communication Technology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to develop relevant tools and methodologies, by stressing the mutual benefits from the co-operations. The library’s participation in the project CLaDA-BG, integrated within the European CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures, offered a chance to take advantage of the multidisciplinary expertise of the partnering organisations and to develop the best methodology for OCR and consequently to enhance the methods of using and handling the acquired machine-readable text.

Hundreds of years of biodiversity research have resulted in the accumulation of a substantial pool of communal knowledge; however, most of it is stored in silos isolated from each other, such as published articles or monographs. The need for a system to store and manage collective biodiversity knowledge in a community-agreed and interoperable open format has evolved into the concept of the Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System (OBKMS). This paper presents OpenBiodiv: An OBKMS that utilizes semantic publishing workflows, text and data mining, common standards, ontology modelling and graph database technologies to establish a robust infrastructure for managing biodiversity knowledge. It is presented as a Linked Open Dataset generated from scientific literature. OpenBiodiv encompasses data extracted from more than 5000 scholarly articles published by Pensoft and many more taxonomic treatments extracted by Plazi from journals of other publishers. The data from both sources are converted to Resource Description Framework (RDF) and integrated in a graph database using the OpenBiodiv-O ontology and an RDF version of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) taxonomic backbone. Through the application of semantic technologies, the project showcases the value of open publishing of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) data towards the establishment of open science practices in the biodiversity domain.

Petya Osenova, Kiril Simov. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019). 2019.

The data-driven Bulgarian WordNet: BTBWNThe paper presents our work towards the simultaneous creation of a data-driven WordNet for Bulgarian and a manually annotated treebank with semantic information. Such an approach requires synchronization of the word senses in both - syntactic and lexical resources, without limiting the WordNet senses to the corpus or vice versa. Our strategy focuses on the identification of senses used in BulTreeBank, but the missing senses of a lemma also have been covered through exploration of bigger corpora. The identified senses have been organized in synsets for the Bulgarian WordNet. Then they have been aligned to the Princeton WordNet synsets. Various types of mappings are considered between both resources in a cross-lingual aspect and with respect to ensuring maximum connectivity and potential for incorporating the language specific concepts. The mapping between the two WordNets (English and Bulgarian) is a basis for applications such as machine translation and multilingual information retrieval. Oparty na danych WordNet bułgarski: BTBWNW artykule przedstawiono naszą pracę na rzecz jednoczesnej budowy opartego na danych wordnetu dla języka bułgarskiego oraz ręcznie oznaczonego informacjami semantycznymi banku drzew. Takie podejście wymaga uzgodnienia znaczeń słów zarówno w zasobach składniowych, jak i leksykalnych, bez ograniczania znaczeń umieszczanych w wordnecie do tych obecnych w korpusie, jak i odwrotnie. Nasza strategia koncentruje się na identyfikacji znaczeń stosowanych w BulTreeBank, przy czym brakujące znaczenia lematu zostały również zbadane przez zgłębienie większych korpusów. Zidentyfikowane znaczenia zostały zorganizowane w synsety bułgarskiego wordnetu, a następnie powiązane z synsetami Princeton WordNet. Rozmaite rodzaje rzutowań są rozpatrywane pomiędzy obydwoma zasobami w kontekście międzyjęzykowym, a także w odniesieniu do zapewnienia maksymalnej łączności i możliwości uwzględnienia pojęć specyficznych dla języka bułgarskiego. Rzutowanie między dwoma wordnetami (angielskim i bułgarskim) jest podstawą dla aplikacji, takich jak tłumaczenie maszynowe i wielojęzyczne wyszukiwanie informacji.