Data model

The central entity types of the datamodel are lexical units and senses. They connect the morpho-syntactic and semantical data in the data model. In essence the model is designed to be a multilingual model, however, currently it is used as a monolingual model that connects with multilingual data (which does not have the same level of granularity) via special entity types.

On the top level the model can be divided into clusters (color-coded in the model):

• lexical units (olive green)
• senses (blue)
• word forms (forest green)
• syntactic structures (brown)
• corpus examples (yellow)
• sense translations (red)
• sense frames (violet)
• resource connections (orange)
• generic features (grey)
• entity types that reference other entity types via meta-attributes (white)

The corpus data is not contained in the database itself, but is referenced and accessed via a concordancer. Some parts of the data model (e.g. structure data) are defined as XML. They are used directly in existing processing pipelines, but can be ported to the ER model if necessary.

Contents

• Overview
  • Purpose and state of this document
  • Database
  • Model diagram
• Model clusters
  • Lexical units
  • Senses
  • Word forms
  • Syntactic structures
  • Corpus examples
  • Sense translations
  • Sense frames
  • Resource connections
  • Generic features

Overview

Purpose and state of this document

This document is intended for technical users who are working with the DDD model and/or backups. For a higher-level, more theoretical and more linguistic description of the data model, see https://wiki.cjvt.si/books/digital-dictionary-database/page/domain-overview (which is currently very brief, but will be expanded). For programmers who will also use the DDD Django repository, see the README_code.md there (yet to be written, for now see README_datamodel_old.md).

The document was written for DDD model v1.14 and in line with DDD backup version 3.2.

Sense

Database

The Digital Dictionary Database is primarily a PostgreSQL database. It contains core tables (with prefix "jedro_"), metadata tables (with prefix "metadata_") and internal tables managed by django and other integrated packages (with prefixes "django_", "auth_", etc.). The core tables contain the Slovene linguistic data, while the metadata tables refer to the core tables and contain data which are not considered part of the language description, but which are needed for central applications (e.g., longer names for dictionaries to display in the database editor).

Furthermore, some data are not stored in the SQL database, but rather in XML extension files (e.g., structures.xml), which also refer to SQL entities via appropriate ids.

This readme focuses on the core data model, which is by far the most complex part of the database.

Model diagram

MySQL WorkBench diagrams are used to develop and visualise the core data model. The project's main Django models.py file is (manually) updated in line with diagram changes.

The diagram contains several color-coded clusters of tables. For an overview of the clusters and a conceptual explanation of the domain, see wiki. This readme will provide a more technical explanation and interpretation of these tables and the key relationships between them. Note that the tables with a relatively dark colour shade in the diagram are just basic coding tables (with only id and name), so will not be covered here explicitly, unless they are of particular importance. Also note that every table in this model also has a last_modified timestamp column, but these are not included in the diagram to avoid repetitive clutter.

Model clusters

Lexical units

The main lexical unit table (LexicalUnit) is the central table in the database. Lexical units consist of a type (LexicalUnitType), a syntactic structure (SyntacticStructure) (ref), and one or more parts (LexicalUnit_Part). They can also be related to each other (LexicalUnitRelation), and they can belong (Lexicon_LexicalUnit) in different lexicons (Lexicon).

As explained here, there are five types of lexical unit, which fall under two broader categories: independent (single_lexeme_unit, compound, phrase) and dependent (collocation, combination). For example, "miza" would be a single_lexeme_unit, "okrogla miza" a compound, and "velika miza" a collocation. Independent types are potential headwords with their own entries in dictionaries, while dependent units can be included in the entries of headword units. At the level of the lexical unit tables, this difference is usually irrelevant, but as we will see, the types do impact how associated data in some other tables are interpreted (e.g., senses, resources).

Lexical unit parts correspond roughly to tokens in corpora. Usually these are words, but not always (the 2nd part of "francosko-slovenski slovar" may correspond to the punctuation character -). In the data model, LexicalUnit_Part connects the lexical unit of the part (LexicalUnit), the component of that unit's syntactic structure the part corresponds to (StructureComponent), and the form of the lexeme (FormEncoding) of that part. For instance, the first (of two) parts of "okrogla miza" connect the lexical unit "okrogla miza" with the first component of the common adjective-noun syntactic structure (ref) and the orthographic form of the appropriate form (feminine singular nominative) of "okrogel" (ref).

A lexical unit is uniquely determined by its type, structure and sequence of parts. Therefore, we cannot have multiple units which have the same combination of these properties, but we can have multiple lexical units which only partially match. For example, we may have two units "švicarski nož" (a compound and a phrase), or two noun single_lexeme_units for two forms of the same lexeme ("oblast" and "oblasti").

LexicalUnitRelations relate two lexical units with a particular relation type. The interpretation is that for a given combination (from_lexical_unit, to_lexical_unit, type), to_lexical_unit is a type for from_lexical_unit. If the relation is symmetric, it is stored twice, once in each direction. (These conventions also apply for the other relation tables.)

Lexical units may belong to particular lexicons (Lexicon), identified with a particular name and version (e.g., Sloleks 2.0). The inclusion is stored in Lexicon_LexicalUnit. However, so far we only store these relations for one version of one lexicon, and it remains to be seen if we will add more.

Senses

While lexical units may be the most central unit in the data model, senses (Sense) are probably the level to which the most data is attached. Lexical units have 1 or more senses, and each sense belongs to a particular lexical unit. Senses can have definitions (Definition), they contain parts (Sense_Part) and they can be related in various ways (SenseRelation). We can also store measures of their occurrences in corpora (Sense_Measure). And if we don't know which of several senses is appropriate for some data, we can group alternatives (SenseCandidate).

Each lexical unit has 1 or more senses with a particular (possibly null) position. However, their interpretation depends on whether the lexical unit is dependent or independent (ref). For independent lexical units, Senses with a non-null position are "real" senses, normally equipped with further lexicographic data such as definitions or labels. The positions determine the order of a lexical unit's senses, normally via lexicographers' explicit decisions. But every independent lexical unit is also given a so-called "dummy" sense, which has null position and is used when we want to associate sense-level data with a lexical unit, but we don't yet know under which sense (which is a common situation because of the challenging nature of automatic semantic categorisation etc.). In addition, if we know that some data corresponds to one of a particular proper subset of a lexical unit's senses, we can also have a sense with null position and candidate pairings (SenseCandidate), which relate particular senses (as candidate_sense) to that sense (potential_sense). However, this sense candidate support has not yet been put to use.

In (lexicographic) theory, dependent lexical units do not have senses, as indeed the main reason they are "dependent" is that their meanings derive somehow from the meanings of their parts (compare "okrogla miza" and "velika miza"). But from a technical point of view, since many kinds of data that are attached to senses (e.g., translations, examples, labels) are relevant for both independent and dependent units, dependent lexical units do have senses as well. For dependent lexical units, all senses have null positions (their ordering in particular contexts is determined by calculable criteria), and we do not anticipate to need sense candidates. However, a dependent lexical unit can still have multiple senses, such as the literal and figurative meanings of the collocation "svinjski jezik" (which will will have different translations, for example). Different senses of the same dependent lexical unit are distinguished by their parts (SensePart) and dependency relations (SenseRelation) (see below).

Sense parts (SensePart) serve two functions, identified by two different types. within_other parts indicate which lexical unit parts of a dependent unit correspond to the sense of a particular independent unit. For instance, the compound "okrogla miza" ("miza") is found in the 2nd and 3rd parts of the collocation "organizirati okroglo mizo". (The reason that sense parts refer to senses of independent units rather than the lexical units themselves is to make it easier to handle example tokens (ref).) within_self parts, on the other hand, allow us to indicate the role of the part in the sense (which is null for within_other parts). The roles are defined, managed and assigned by lexicographers. In within_self parts, we are always connecting lexical unit parts of a lexical unit with that lexical unit's own sense, which is redundant, but it does simplify our data model as it prevents the need for creation of two similar tables.

Sense relations (SenseRelation) relate pairs of senses with a certain relation type. Senses of two independent lexical units can be related with classic semantic relations (e.g. synonym, relating a particular sense of "mali" with a particular sense of "majhen"). There is also a special relation type (dependency) which relates a dependent unit's sense (to_sense) with an independent unit's sense (from_sense). For example, the literal sense of "svinjski jezik" can be related to the physical senses of "svinjski" and "jezik", while its metaphorical sense can be related to more abstract senses of "svinjski" and "jezik". We can also have a sense of "svinjski jezik" which is not related to any independent unit senses, which would be the "dummy" sense for the dependent lexical unit. Therefore, sense relations between senses of independent lexical units give additional information about senses, while dependency sense relations help define a dependent sense.

Definitions are string descriptions of a sense. They are only used for independent lexical units, for which they are the main aid in identifying senses for lexicographers and users. Definitions can be of different types, among which indicator is the most common and important.

Sense measures (Sense_Measure) record basic statistical measure values for a sense in a particular corpus. For instance, we would use this table to record that the physical sense of "svinjski jezik" occurs in a particular corpus 157 times. If we are dealing with a corpus which has not been semantically disambiguated, we can use the lexical unit's dummy sense (i.e., the position-less sense of an independent unit or the relation-less sense of a dependent unit).

Word forms

Slovene is a highly inflectional language, where words have many forms with different sets of features, so the data model includes a hierarchy of tables for morphological data. From top to bottom, there are word grammatical categories (Category), form-independent lexemes of particular categories (Lexeme), abstract combinations of particular form features for each lexeme (WordForm), concrete forms for such combinations (FormRepresentation) and actual string representations of those concrete forms (FormEncoding). Word forms have a hierarchy of form representations of different types, encoded as relations (FormRepresentationRelation). We can also store basic form representation corpus statistics (FormRepresentation_Measure), and classify form representations by their paradigm patterns (FormRepresentation_Pattern). Finally, lexemes also have canonical form representations for each type (Lemma_FormRepresentation).

Lexemes (Lexeme) represent a word (or punctuation) consisting of a lemma (the basic or dictionary form of the word) (e.g., "miza"), a category (e.g, "noun", "preposition", "punctuation") and a set of category-dependent lexeme-level MSD (see below) features (e.g., noun gender) (ref). This combination almost uniquely determines a lexeme, so we can have two different lexemes with the same lemma (e.g., "dolg"), or even with the same lemma and category (e.g., "klop"), but normally not with the same lemma, category and lexeme-level MSD features. The exception is if we have differences in non-orthographic form representations (e.g., lesen (accentuation="lesén") and lesen(accentuation="lésen"), but these are few and handled specially for now.

For a given lexeme, word forms (WordForm) are in effect an abstract node for a particular combination of category-dependent form-level features (e.g., adjective gender) (ref). For instance, Slovene nouns typically have 18 word forms (6 cases x 3 numbers). The combination of a lexeme's category, its lexeme-level features and a given word form's form-level features can be mapped to a morphosyntactic description (MSD) for the word form, which lexicographers work with.

For each abstract word form, there is a hierarchy of form representations (FormRepresentation). We currently have three different types of form representations: orthography (e.g., "dekan"), accentuation (e.g., "dekàn") and pronunciation (e.g., "dɛˈkan"). Accentuation representations fall under particular orthography representations, and pronunciation representations fall under particular accentuation representations (e.g., "dɛˈkan" falls under "dekàn", not "dekán", although they are all form representations corresponding to the MSD "Somei"). These inter-type relationships are encoded as relations (FormRepresentationRelation). In case there are multiple representations of the same type for a given form, norm_status can be used to indicate the representation's relative status (e.g., "non-standard", "variant").

The actual string representations of form representations are stored as form encodings (FormEncoding). This is a separate level, because there can be multiple encodings for the same representation using different encoding scripts. For instance, pronunciations can be encoded using SAMPA or IPA, and in some languages even orthographic forms are commonly written with different scripts (e.g., Cyrillic and Latin for Serbian).

As for senses, we can store basic corpus statistics at the level of form representations (FormRepresentation_Measure). For instance, this table can record that the single genitive variant "Shakespeareja" of the masculine lexeme "Shakespeare" occurs 123 times in Gigafida 2.0.

Also, form representations tend to follow certain paradigms (as typically described in grammar books). These are managed by lexicographers and represented with pattern codes (FormPattern). Individual form representations can then be assigned to particular patterns (FormRepresentation_Pattern).

Finally, a lexeme's lemma can be explicitly associated with a subset of its form representations (Lemma_FormRepresentation). This normally consists of all the form representations which fall under a particular abstract word form, which is usually determined by the lexeme's category. For example, for noun lexemes, this would be the representations falling under the singular nominative word form. The lexeme's lemma should match one of the lexeme's orthography lemma representations.

Syntactic structures

Syntactic structures describe the structure of the canonical forms of lexical units. Each syntactic structure (SyntacticStructure) defines a sequence of components (StructureComponent), their properties, and dependencies between them. Structures can also be related to each other (StructureRelation). Each lexical unit falls under a particular syntactic structure. However, most of the details of syntactic structures are not stored in the SQL database, but rather in a related XML extension file (static/extensions/structures.xml). There are several reasons for this (see wiki). The format and contents of this XML extension will not be covered here.

Structures (SyntacticStructure) have only an id, which serves primarily to connect the SQL core and XML extension. New lexical units are normally assigned to particular syntactic structures with a dedicated pipeline. The pipeline uses a standard parser (CLASSLA) together with scripts which match the lexical unit's sequence of parts to a syntactic structure, and creates a new XML structure if necessary. Such new structures are then added to the SQL database separately.

While most of the details of syntactic structures are kept in the XML, we do also register the components in SQL (StructureComponent). The main reason for this is so we can efficiently access the position (index) of the component within the structure, which is relevant when working with LexicalUnitParts (ref).

We can associate structures with each other as relations (StructureRelation). For instance, lexicographers may want to explicitly relate two structures which are similar except that the verb is reflexive in one structure but not in the other (e.g., consider lexical units "umivati roke" in "umivati si roke").

Corpus examples

Senses of lexical units can be associated with corpus text to demonstrate real usage. Corpora (Corpus) are registered in the database. Examples (Example) always come from a particular corpus and are comprised of sentences (ExampleSentence). A single example can apply to different lexical units in particular senses (Sense_Example), and we track the tokens of those lexical units within the examples (SenseExampleToken). Examples can be related to each other (ExampleRelation).

Corpora (Corpus) are external resources of parsed text or speech and identified with a name and version (e.g., Gigafida 2.0).

Examples (Example) are a sequence of sentences from a corpus that have been chosen to exemplify one or more lexical units. In most cases, they have only one sentence, but sometimes consist of more, when more context is needed.

The sentences of an example (ExampleSentence) have an id internal to the corpus, and a position within the example. With the use of an external API, the id can be used to fetch the structured sentence from the corpus in TEI format.

Senses of lexical units can be associated with a particular example (Sense_Example). The same example can be used for different lexical units (e.g., "Organiziral je okroglo mizo." could be an example for senses of "organizirati", "okrogla miza", "organizirati okroglo mizo", etc.).

We also track which tokens of an example represent the lexical unit (SenseExampleToken), which is useful when visualising examples, such as marking the lexical unit in bold. For instance, if "Organiziral je okroglo mizo." is used as an example for "okrogla miza", then in this table we would note positions 3 and 4. However, for dependent lexical units (ref), we may also want to differentiate between one of its independent lexical units and the rest. For instance, if "Organiziral je okroglo mizo." is used as an example of "organizirati okroglo mizo" and we are considering it as a collocation for "okrogla miza", then we might want to put, say, "okroglo mizo" in bold and "organizirati" in italic. For this reason, the table also includes a SensePart (ref): if the SensePart is of type within_other, then we can use it to make this distinction.

Sense translations

The data model supports storage of translations from Slovene to other languages (Language) for senses (Sense) and examples (Sense_Example) and may be in the form of an ordinary translation (Translation) and/or explanation (Explanation). If the translations come from external sources (ExternalSource), such as monolingual dictionaries of other languages, they can be associated with translations (Translation_ExternalSource) along with an external id.

Since translations are used for both senses and examples, a more abstract table is also used (Translation). A translation may be empty, in which case it should have at least one associated explanation.

Explanations (Explanation) are alteratives to translations, and are normally a longer description. They do not need to be in the same language as the Translation (this may depend, for example, on the target users).

Translations are stored for senses (Sense_Translation) and examples (SenseExample_Translation). Note that translations are not symmetric. For senses, the translation will be analogous to the string of a lexical unit in the other language (and not a particular sense of that unit). For examples, the text of the translation is stored directly in the database and the lexical unit is not marked (ref).

Sense frames

Frames provide a formal description of a verb's semantic arguments. Frames (Frame) have components (FrameComponent). The same abstract frame can be used by senses of different verbs (Sense_Frame), for which components may have specific subroles (SenseFrame_Component). As this part of the data model has not yet been used, it may well undergo further development.

In the model, frames (Frame) themselves are abstract elements with only ids. In addition to providing foreign keys for related tables, these ids will also be used in a new xml extension for semantic frames (analogous to ref).

Each frame has a set of frame components (FrameComponent). The components are of different types corresponding to semantic roles (e.g., agent, experiencer, goal).

Senses of independent lexical units can be assigned to particular frames (Sense_Frame). For example, a sense of dati might be associated with a frame which has an agent component for the giver, a patient component for the object given and a recipient component for the recipient.

For particular verbs, frame components take on more specific roles than prescribed by their component type (SenseFrame_Component). For instance, while agent components may generally include any kind of animate objects, a verb like "plavati" is restricted to humans and animals.

Resource connections

In addition to storing lexical units and their diverse associated data, the data model also supports the means to group (roughly speaking) subsets of this data for particular purposes (e.g., a Slovene-Hungarian dictionary portal) and assign them statuses in that context. There are registry tables for resources (Resource) and statuses (Status), and we can assign headword lexical units to resources (LexicalUnit_Status) for valid combinations (Resource_Status), as well as specifying relevant translation languages (Resource_Language). We can also specify if certain data under headwords should be included in a resource and with what status (ResourceRelevance).

The resource table (Resource) just registers resources with a short name or acronym (e.g., "VSMS" for the Slovene-Hungarian dictionary). Each resource is typically associated with a relatively large project or particular perspective on the database (model and/or data), and lexicographers may want various imports or exports specific to that resource. There will often also be a particular portal for a particular resource (VSMS), for which a simplified resource-specific database is normally generated from the central database. If a resource is a bilingual or multilingual dictionary, then it is assumed that the source language is Slovene, and the target translation languages are explicitly stored (Resource_Language) (e.g., Hungarian and Serbian for a dictionary resource with translations of Slovene units in Hungarian and Serbian).

The status table (Status) registers the global set of string statuses that are potentially available to use for resource headwords (e.g., "manually-checked"). The actual statuses available for a particular resource are then a subset of that (Resource_Status).

Independent lexical units can be "included" in a resource by assigning them a status of that resource (LexicalUnit_Status). Doing so effectively makes them headwords for the resource. For instance, if "miza" is assigned a particular status (e.g., "automatic") associated with the Sloleks resource, then lexicographers will expect that "miza" will be a headword in the (generated) Sloleks portal, perhaps marked in a particular way to signal that particular status. Note that dependent lexical units cannot be assigned to a resource in this way, because by definition they cannot be headwords but rather fall under them.

In order to specify if and how data subordinate to headwords should be included for particular resources, a special Django feature is used (generic relations, which allows us to have one table (ResourceRelevance), rather than a separate one for each type of subordinate data, to specify resource relevance. The content type (content_type_id) identifies the appropriate table and the object's id (object_id) specifies its id within that table. Since some types of objects (e.g., dependent lexical units) could fall under different headwords, headword_id is used to explicitly specify the headword (e.g., we may want to include the collocation "velika miza" under "miza" but not under "velik" for a particular resource). The inclusion_id and status_id columns specify whether the data should be included and with with what status, respectively.

However, in order to avoid the need for exhaustively adding and updating a ResourceRelevance row for every single piece of subordinate data under every single headword in every single resource, a set of agreed upon rules and defaults is applied. First, only specific preestablished kinds of data can be selectively included in resources - at present these are headword senses, dependent unit senses (which in practice means collocations and combinations), and sense examples. Second, the default is that headword senses are included (ResourceRelevanceInclusion:include), while dependent unit senses and sense examples are excluded (ResourceRelevanceInclusion:exclude). Third, it is assumed that a default status is defined for each resource (note that these statuses are different than the headword-levels ones in Resource_Status). Under these assumptions, resource relevances only need to be defined for data if it is of one of the specified types, and its inclusion and/or status are not the defaults. If the columns contain null or the default for both columns, then it is the same (in the business logic) as if the row is not included.

Generic features

In order to enable associating objects with particular features without promoting them to columns in their tables (which may or may not be relevant for all objects in the table), the data model also provides some tables for more generic purposes. Features (Feature) can be defined which take on a set of values (FeatureValue) and are grouped into categories (FeatureCategory). Values can be associated with objects (Object_Feature) and enter into relations (FeatureValueRelation). Playing a technically separate but conceptually similar function to features, the Measure table registers statistical measures for data.

Every feature (Feature) has a name and belongs to a category (FeatureCategory), the combination of which must be unique. Feature categories serve to group related features. In practice, we've used categories with names that match the table that they are used with (e.g., sense_translation for features which are only used with Sense_Translations), or the generic category general if a feature is used with objects from multiple tables.

Feature values (FeatureValue) list all the allowed values (as strings) of a feature. The model does not distinguish between theoretically close-ended features (e.g., "gender") and open-ended features (e.g., "latin_name"); for the latter, extra feature values are just created as needed.

While features with their values are ultimately more or less equivalent to basic name-value pairs, they can also be related to each other if needed. A particular case of this is with labels, where there are two hierarchies of features: label_type and label_value. For instance, the label_type feature has a value "domain", which is related to a subset of the label_value feature (e.g., "zgodovina", "kemija", "organska kemija"), and these values have hierarchical relations (e.g., "kemija" -> "organska kemija").

Using the same Django generic relations as ResourceRelevance (ref), objects of any table in the core data model can then be associated with one or more values of one or more features (Object_Feature). An object can of course have multiple feature values, even (though rare) for the same feature.

Finally, there is a separate registry table of measures (Measure), which can be used to record basic statistical information for different kinds of data in particular corpora. For now, the model enables this for senses (Sense_Measure) and form representations (FormRepresentation_Measure).