---
title: "The Index Thomisticus Treebank as Linked Data in the LiLa Knowledge Base — Mambrini 2022"
description: "The authors propose publishing dependency treebanks as Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD). 31 references, cited by 8 papers here."
authors: ["Francesco Mambrini", "Marco Passarotti", "Giovanni Moretti", "Matteo Pellegrini"]
year: 2022
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.428/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mambrini-2022-index-thomisticus-treebank-as-linked/"
---
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# The Index Thomisticus Treebank as Linked Data in the LiLa Knowledge Base

**Authors:** [Francesco Mambrini](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/francesco-mambrini/), [Marco Passarotti](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/marco-passarotti/), Giovanni Moretti and Matteo Pellegrini · **Year:** 2022 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.428/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.428.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4283119999)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 8 in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Latin treebanks already share a common annotation format thanks to Universal Dependencies, but they are still not linked to lexical resources. To find the meaning of a word from a corpus, its translations or its WordNet synsets, one has to query different services separately. Moreover, the converters to UD do not fully harmonize the annotation vocabularies of different projects. The authors propose publishing dependency treebanks as Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD). The approach is demonstrated on the Index Thomisticus Treebank (ITTB), the largest syntactically annotated Latin corpus, which consists of works by Thomas Aquinas. In the LiLa knowledge base, all annotation layers of ITTB are represented as an RDF graph. The corpus structure is described with the POWLA ontology, and morphology and syntactic relations with the OLiA ontologies. Lemmatized tokens are linked to lemmas in the Lemma Bank. Two versions of the syntactic annotation, the original one and the one converted to UD, are attached to the same tokens. In this way, the treebank becomes part of a network of Latin resources that can be queried with SPARQL, and the UD annotation becomes easier to compare with other schemes. The authors present this as a deeper model for publishing UD corpora in LLOD than the shallow conversion via CoNLL-RDF.

## Key points
- ITTB contains about 450 thousand tokens of texts by Thomas Aquinas (13th century). It is the largest of the five Latin treebanks in UD 2.9; the others are Perseus (~53 thousand), PROIEL (~200 thousand), LLCT (~242 thousand) and UDante (~55 thousand).
- Three ontologies are used: POWLA for corpus data, in particular the hierarchy of documents and their parts; OLiA for linguistic annotation, in particular the models for UD tags and relations following Chiarcos et al. (2020); OntoLex-Lemon for lexical data.
- The core of LiLa is the Lemma Bank, which gathers its lemmas from the database used by LEMLAT, a morphological analyzer. Corpus tokens and lexicon entries become interoperable because they refer to the same lemmas.
- Both syntactic annotations of ITTB, the original and the UD one, are linked to the very same tokens. The data are open for querying through the LiLa SPARQL endpoint.
- The UD corpora already present in the LLOD Cloud were converted shallowly via CoNLL-RDF and have no links to annotation vocabularies. In this work, the ITTB annotation is linked to the OLiA ontologies.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [🌐 Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/universal-dependencies/) · [🗂️ Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/) · [🕸️ Knowledge graphs & ontologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/knowledge-graphs/) · [🏛️ Latin](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/latin/)

## Institutions

- [Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universita-cattolica-del-sacro-cuore/) — University, Milan, Italy · 4 works · 32 citations

## Cite

Cite as: Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti, Giovanni Moretti and Matteo Pellegrini. 2022. The Index Thomisticus Treebank as Linked Data in the LiLa Knowledge Base. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{mambrini2022index,
  title = {{The Index Thomisticus Treebank as Linked Data in the LiLa Knowledge Base}},
  author = {Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti, Giovanni Moretti and Matteo Pellegrini},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.63317/2o9mccqqf2ch},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2o9mccqqf2ch}
}
```

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## References

31 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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