Architecture of the Linguistic Platform Turklang

Abstract

The article describes the architecture of the TurkLang multifunctional linguistic platform, currently being developed at the Institute of Applied Semiotics of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan. The system is based on a three-level knowledge base: linguistic universals, descriptions of units of specific languages, and empirical speech data. The knowledge base is implemented as a graph, where the primary storage unit is the morpheme – the minimal meaningful unit of language (akin to an atomic data element). This design choice is driven by the element-combinatorial nature of Turkic languages: a word form (the concrete realization of a word in text) is a linear chain consisting of a root and sequentially attached affixes – modifiers, each expressing a single grammatical category (case, number, tense, etc.) in a strictly fixed order. The paper examines levels of abstraction, types of relationships between entities, and mechanisms for integration with external sources (an electronic encyclopedia, lexicographic resources, and GIS data). Special attention is paid to the application of international standards for syntactic (Universal Dependencies), semantic (Universal Meaning Representation), and pragmatic (DiAML) annotation. A comparison with existing platforms (Sketch Engine, LingvoDoc, Apertium) is provided. To date, the platform's knowledge base covers more than 30 languages and dialects, contains over 237,000 root morphemes and about 40,000 compatibility rules, while the corpus component comprises over 180 million of word occurrences.