Encoding and presenting interlinear text using XML technologies

Encoding and Presenting Interlinear Text Using XML Technologies Baden Hughes, Steven Bird and Catherine Bow Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering University of Melbourne Victoria 3010, Australia {badenh, sb, cbow}@cs.mu.oz.au Abstract Interlinear text is a common presenta- tional format for linguistic information, and its creation and management have been greatly facilitated by the develop- ment of specialised software. In earlier work we developed a four-level model and corresponding formal specification for interlinear text. Here we describe a suitable XML representation for the model and show how it can be rendered into a variety of convenient presenta- tional formats. We conclude by dis- cussing architectural extensions, an ap- plication programming interface for in- terlinear text, and prospects for embed- ding the interlinear model into existing applications. 1 Introduction Interlinear text is a standard presentational form for displaying a source text aligned with variety of linguistic annotation phonological, morpholog- ical and syntactic analyses, glosses and transla- tions. An example of Yidinj interlinear text is shown in Figure 1. Interlinear texts can vary in the number of rows, the content and level of analysis for each njundu wanjdjam you-SA where-ABL Where have you come from ? Figure 1: Yidinj Interlinear Text row, and certain aspects of layout. However, as we survey a broad range of cases, we can observe consistent patterns in layout. These patterns have lead us to propose an abstract model of interlin- ear text which is sufficiently general that it en- compasses the majority of cases based on a sur- vey of print and electronic representations of in- terlinear text (Bow, Hughes and Bird 2003). As we will show here, the model has a natural repre- sentation in XML, which can be used to generate a variety of useful visualisations. We begin by de- scribing the model in §2, then propose a suitable XML representation (§3). In §4 we discuss com- mon presentation styles, and in §5 we show how they can be implemented using XSL. Finally, we report our work on a prototype (§6) and discuss future research (§7). 2 The EMELD Interlinear Text Model For the purposes of this discussion we adopt the following nomenclature. By interlinear text we mean a written record of an external linguistic event, consisting of a transcription aligned with linguistic analysis. A line of interlinear text refers to a row of transcription plus all the rows of analy- sis pertaining to it. Within the line, there is a hor- izontal modality of words and their analysis, plus there is the vertical modality of row elements to indicate the structure of the interlinear text. Ad- ditionally there is the vertical alignment of one row above the other; typically there is consistency from one block of rows to the next in the vertical alignment of these rows. Within the context of the EMELD project (EMELD, 2000), Bow, Hughes and Bird (2003) proposed a four-level, hierarchical model of inter- linear text consisting of Text, Phrase, Word and Morpheme levels. A phrase is a collection of …

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