CCGweb

CCGweb is a Web-based annotation platform for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG).

A live demo is available here: https://ccgweb.phil.hhu.de/

CCGweb is described in the following paper:

Kilian Evang, Lasha Abzianidze, Johan Bos (2019): CCGweb: a New Annotation Tool and a First Quadrilingual CCG Treebank. In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop. Florence, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Technical Overview

CCGweb consists of three parts:

• a natural language processing pipeline that turns raw text into CCG derivations, optionally aided by human annotation decisions
• a REST server
• a PHP frontend

Database

The REST server requires a MySQL database to store its data. Assuming you want to use a database called ccgweb on localhost with user ccgweb and password topsecret123, this is how you can create it (enter the respective passwords when asked):

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE ccgweb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ccgweb.* TO 'ccgweb'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'topsecret123';
mysql> EXIT;
$ mysql -u ccgweb -p ccgweb < db_structure.sql

Also create a file config.json that contains your database credentials. Use config.json.sample as a template.

Pipeline

The pipeline is defined by the rules in produce.ini. Its output files are dumped into the out directory. Its software dependencies must be placed into the ext directory and models into the models directory before use. Specifically, the following directories and files are expected to exist:

• ext/easyccg/easyccg.jar: the Parallel Meaning Bank patched version of Mike Lewis’s EasyCCG parser
• models/parse/{eng,deu,ita,nld}.model: EasyCCG models for English, German, Italian and Dutch.
• ext/elephant, the Elephant tokenizer
• models/tok.iob/{eng,deu,ita,nld}.model, Elephant models for English, German, Italian and Dutch.
• models/ud-2.2-conll18-baseline-models, models for UDPipe (used for tokenization)
• ext/produce, the Produce build system.
• ext/viasock, the Viasock serverizer.

Further dependencies can be installed as follows on Ubuntu 16.04:

sudo apt install python-lxml swi-prolog python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-wheel python3-dev build-essentials
pip3 install --user ufal.udpipe

REST API

To install the dependencies for the REST server on Ubuntu 16.04:

sudo apt install python3-falcon gunicorn3 python3-mysqldb python3-passlib python3-lxml

To start it:

./rest-server

PHP Frontend

To install the dependencies for the PHP frontend on Ubuntu 16.04:

sudo apt install php php-xsl composer
cd site
composer install
cd ..

To create a test installation at http://localhost/ccgweb:

sudo ln -s `pwd`/site /var/www/html/ccgweb

To create a config file:

cp site/inc/config.inc.php.sample site/inc/config.inc.php