Pepper: Handling A Multiverse Of Formats
Creators: name: Zipser, Florian
name: Zeldes, Amir
name: Ritz, Julia
name: Romary, Laurent
name: Leser, Ulf
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2011
Subjects: Salt
Pepper
conversion
linguistic data
format
conversion framework
EXMARaLDA
TIGER XML
corpus
converter
plugin

description: With the rising importance of empirical data in many fields of linguistic research, we see an<br>
increase not only in the amount of electronically available corpora, but also in the number of<br>
tools used to make this data accessible, processable and searchable. Most of these tools have<br>
been developed in the course of specific linguistic projects and therefore can only handle a<br>
certain kinds of linguistic information, such as syntactic-structures (e.g. TIGERSearch, Lezius<br>
2002), or dialogue-structures (e.g. EXMARaLDA, Schmidt 2004) etc. At the same time, each<br>
tool uses its own, proprietary format for representing the text and its annotations. Such<br>
formats are optimized for a specific kind of analysis and the performance of a specific<br>
processing tool. Consequently they cannot easily be mapped onto each other. This impedes<br>
those linguistic research questions which pre-suppose a global view on data, i.e., which<br>
require the option to correlate, query and analyze several kinds of linguistic annotations at<br>
once.<br>
We present Pepper, a modularized converter framework addressing the problem that a<br>
linguistic researcher may be limited to a small set of questions due to the tool(s) he or she<br>
uses. Pepper is based on the meta-model Salt (Zipser &amp; Romary 2010) and offers the<br>
possibility of converting data from n formats into m formats with a minimal number of<br>
necessary mappings. The pluggable architecture of Pepper allows the injection of new formats<br>
into the framework. Pepper has no restrictions on the underlying techniques used in<br>
representing these formats (e.g. XML, tabular-formats, bracketing-formats or mixtures<br>
thereof).
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