LAT Bridge: Bridging Tools for Annotation and Exploration of Rich Linguistic Data

We present a software module, the LAT Bridge, which enables bidirectional communication between the annotation and exploration tools developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as part of our Language Archiving Technology (LAT) tool suite. These existing annotation and exploration tools enable the annotation, enrichment, exploration and archive management of linguistic resources. The user community has expressed the desire to use different combinations of LAT tools in conjunction with each other. The LAT Bridge is designed to cater for a number of basic data interaction scenarios between the LAT annotation and exploration tools. These interaction scenarios (e.g. bootstrapping a wordlist, searching for annotation examples or lexical entries) have been identified in collaboration with researchers at our institute. We had to take into account that the LAT tools for annotation and exploration represent a heterogeneous application scenario with desktop-installed and web-based tools. Additionally, the LAT Bridge has to work in situations where the Internet is not available or only in an unreliable manner (i.e. with a slow connection or with frequent interruptions). As a result, the LAT Bridge’s architecture supports both online and offline communication between the LAT annotation and exploration tools.