Presentation of CLaDA-BG: National Interdisciplinary Research E-Infrastructure for Bulgarian Language and Cultural Heritage Resources at event of the Department of Bulgarian Language, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”

On December 1, 2022, in hall 147 at the Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski” an edition of the  Linguistic seminar of the Department of Bulgarian Language was held. The event was organized by Prof. Dr. Gergana Datcheva, Prof. Dr. Yovka Tisheva and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Marina Dzhonova. At this event the National Interdisciplinary Research E-Infrastructure for Bulgarian Language and Cultural Heritage Resources – CLaDA-BG was presented. The presentation was a natural continuation of the Open event for CLaDA-BG held on November 16, 2022, which gathered many scientists and experts in the field of electronic resources. Guest lecturers at this edition of the seminar were Prof. Dr. Petya Osenova (Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski” and Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT-BAS)) and Prof. Dr. Kiril Simov (IICT-BAS). They presented the history and the structure of CLaDA-BG and made  demonstrations of some  of the developed resources In the first part of the seminar Prof. Dr. Petya Osenova introduced the initial steps in building of CLaDA-BG, as well as the mission, goals and the general principles in this infrastructure. She focused on the importance of teamwork in achieving high-quality and wide range of language resources and applications. Prof. Dr. Osenova shared with the audience that this would not be possible without the partners in the consortium, who provide quality content and specialized knowledge in their domain. Next, she pointed out that one of the most important aims of the infrastructure was the integration of knowledge in a common context as well as the linking among the various data resources, and between data and knowledge. Thus, the goal is to build a Bulgaria-centric Knowledge Graph – BGKG. 

In the second part of the CLaDA-BG presentation Prof. Dr. Kiril Simov demonstrated some of the already created resources together with the software systems for their development. He presented the electronic language resource All about words and the Bulgarian Bultreebank WordNet (BTB-WN). He also showed the connection between them and the opportunity to add other sources of information about Bulgarian language (dictionaries, encyclopedias, specialized data) with the aim to enrich and contextualize the knowledge. Prof. Dr. Kiril Simov showed the CLaDA-BG-Dict system, which supports the work on the BTB-WN, and the system for semantic annotation – Link_To_URL.  

The event was attended by academics, MA and PhD students from the Faculty of Slavic Studies at the Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski”. Thanks to the shared knowledge and resources at the seminar, there came suggestions from the audience to the representatives of CLaDA-BG for cooperation and providing of data, which to be processed and integrated in the Bulgaria-centric Knowledge Graph.