Ligt: Towards an Ecosystem for Managing I nterlinear G lossed T exts with L inguistic L inked D ata (2025)

Abstract: Ligt is an RDF vocabulary developed for representing Interlinear Glossed Text, a common representation of language material used in particular in field linguistics and linguistic typology. In this paper, we look at its current status and different aspects of its adoption. More specifically, we explore the questions of data conversion, storage, and exploitation. We present ligttools, a set of newly developed converters, report on a series of experiments regarding querying Ligt datasets, and analyse the performance with various infrastructure configurations.

## background interlinear glossed text (igt) is a notation commonly used to represent language examples in descriptive and typological linguistics. it is designed to provide an intuitive way of showing language material so that it could be understood without needing to know that language. igt data may consist of any number of layers added under the original text (hence interlinear): word-by-word translation, grammatical meaning of morphemes, transliteration, free translation, etc. some layers have morpheme-by-morpheme alignment between each other, e.g. morpheme segmentation and grammatical meaning of morphemes. consider the following example from the adyghe language: 1 (1) adəgjejə-m adyghea-obl jə-q w əŝhe-xe-r, poss-mountain-pl-abs jə-psəχ w e-čer-xe-r poss-river-tumultuous-pl-abs daxe-x beautiful-pl 'the mountains of adyghea, its tumultuous rivers are beautiful.' this example consists of three layers: morphological segmentation, glosses aligned with the 1 source data and attribution: https://imtvault.org/ b/336/ex/langsci336-38caad062e.htm . the variability of this representation grants a level of flexibility that makes it applicable across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. this, however, also hinders its interoperability given that two different authors might use different ways to encode the same grammatical category. @xcite another, more technical hurdle is the large amount of different formats in which igt can be represented, ranging from non-unicode plain text and xml to relational databases. all these factors make it more difficult to redistribute and reuse the data, or combine and compare several data sources. a solution to this would be to use an interoperable representation to which all the data sources can be converted in a lossless way. an obvious contender for such a representation is rdf. in our previous research, we introduced ligt, an rdf-native vocabulary for representing igt data (chiarcos and ionov, 2019), a generalisation over commonly used formats at the time, namely toolbox, flex and xigt. @xcite later, we showed the applicability of this vocabulary on a dataset with 76 pidgin and creole languages (ionov, 2021). additionally, nordhoff (2020) and nordhoff and krämer (2022) successfully applied it to sev-eral hundred languages from endangered language archives and linguistic literature. in this paper, we take a step forward and focus on the next steps that ensure the vocabulary usability and potential for adoption now that its applicability has been proven. for this, we need to generalise over how ld resources are created. according to a commonly used methodology for publishing multilingual linked data (vila-suero et al., 2014), the process consists of the following steps: to understand which steps should be taken on the way from a vocabulary to a usable ecosystem, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of linguists, archivists and other users who might want to use ligt and analyse how they could approach each of these steps. since we know the nature of the data and the modelling, we consider the first two steps solved. this means that the focus of this paper is on the remaining three steps: generation (or conversion), linking and publication. the linking step has also received some attention in the previous research (ionov, 2021; nordhoff and krämer, 2022), so instead of exploring linking per se, we are going to focus on how to employ these links, i.e. the infrastructure and performance for federated queries across several data sources. the rest of the paper is organised as follows: in section 2 we give a brief overview of the current data model and present newly developed converters, section 3 describes a series of case studies on querying different volumes of ligt data linked to external vocabularies with different infrastructure configurations. finally, in section 4 we provide a summary and outline future directions. ## summary and outlook in this paper, we looked at the current state of ligt, an rdf vocabulary for representing interlinear glossed text. looking through the lens of publication of ld resources, we reflected on its current position and the current state of an ecosystem around it. we presented ligttools, a suite of tools for ligt, including a set of converters for common igt formats: cldf, toolbox and flex. additionally, we explored two ways to simplify the usual infrastructure required to work with rdf resources: first by removing a sparql endpoint and moving the computation to the client, and second by removing static rdf data altogether, replacing it with an on-the-fly conversion. we conclude that while client-side computation provide competitive results while removing most challenging requirements, on-the-fly conversion is warranted only with very small datasets and infrequent queries. still, there might be a case for it, especially when the source data is subject to change or cannot be easily saved as a whole. the next step towards the ligt ecosystem -developing ligt workbench, a prospective standalone tool for management and searching in local and remote igt collections. developing it testing on real-world linguistic problems is the direction of future research.