Reconciling Heterogeneous Descriptions of Language Resources

Language resources are a cornerstone of linguistic research and for the develop-ment of natural language processing tools, but the discovery of relevant resources re-mains a challenging task. This is due to the fact that relevant metadata records are spread among different repositories and it is currently impossible to query all these repositories in an integrated fashion, as they use different data models and vocab-ularies. In this paper we present a first at-tempt to collect and harmonize the meta-data of different repositories, thus mak-ing them queriable and browsable in an integrated way. We make use of RDF and linked data technologies for this and provide a first level of harmonization of the vocabularies used in the different re-sources by mapping them to standard RDF vocabularies including Dublin Core and DCAT. Further, we present an approach that relies on NLP and in particular word sense disambiguation techniques to har-monize resources by mapping values of at-tributes – such as the type, license or in-tended use of a resource – into normal-ized values. Finally, as there are dupli-cate entries within the same repository as well as across different repositories, we also report results of detection of these du-plicates.