A Lightweight Modeling Middleware for Corpus Processing

Present-day empirical research in computational or theoretical linguistics has at its disposal an enormous wealth in the form of richly annotated and diverse corpus resources. Especially the points of contact between modalities are areas of exciting new research. However, progress in those areas in particular suffers from poor coverage in terms of visualization or query systems. Many limitations for such tools stem from the non-uniform representations of very diverse resources and the lack of standards that address this problem from the perspective of processing or querying. In this paper we present our framework for modeling arbitrary multi-modal corpus resources in a unified form for processing tools. It serves as a middleware system and combines the expressiveness of general graph-based models with a rich metadata schema to preserve linguistic specificity. By separating data structures and their linguistic interpretations, it assists tools on top of it so that they can in turn allow their users to more efficiently exploit corpus resources.