XML-based Stand-off Representation and Exploitation of Multi-Level Linguistic Annotation.pdfVIP

XML-based Stand-off Representation and Exploitation of Multi-Level Linguistic Annotation Stefanie Dipper Institute of Linguistics University of Potsdam dipper@ling.uni-potsdam.de Abstract: This paper deals with the representation of multi-level linguistic annota- tions. It proposes an XML-based, generic stand-off architecture and presents an exam- ple instantiation. Application scenarios that profit from this architecture are sketched 1 out. In recent years, corpus linguistics has become more and more important to a broad com- munity, including people working in theoretical, applied and computational linguistics. To many of them, speech and text corpora represent a rich source of data and phenomena, forming the basis of their research. Benefit from such data is even more important if the data is annotated by suitable information, allowing for fast and effective retrieval of rel- evant data. Whereas corpora of the first generation featured part-of-speech and syntactic annotations (e.g. PennTreebank [MSM93], TIGER corpus [BDE04]), the focus has now switched to properties beyond the (morpho-)syntactic level. Recent corpora are annotated by semantic information (PropBank [KP02], FrameNet [JPB03], SALSA [EKPP03]), pragmatic information (Penn Discourse TreeBank [MPJW04], RST Discourse Treebank [CMO03], Potsdam Commentary Corpus [Ste04]), and dialogue structure (Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL [JSB97]). Annotations often have to be carried out manually — reliable (semi-)automatic tools exist only for the annotation of part of speech and syntax, and are restricted to well-researched languages like English or German. Moreover, hand-annotated training material is a prereq- uisite for the development of automatic tools.