A Common Framework for Syntactic Annotation

A Common Framework for Syntactic Annotation Nancy Ide Department of Computer Science Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY 12604-0520 USA ide@cs.vassar.edu Laurent Romary LORIA/CNRS Campus Scientifique, B.P. 239 54506 Vandoeuvre-l�s-Nancy, FRANCE romary@loria.fr Abstract It is widely recognized that the proliferation of annotation schemes runs counter to the need to re-use language resources, and that standards for linguistic annotation are becoming increasingly mandatory. To answer this need, we have developed representation framework comprised ofa an abstract model for a variety of different annotation types (e.g., morpho-syntactic tagging, syntactic annotation, co-reference annotation, etc.), which can be instantiated in different ways depending on the annotator�s approach and goals. In this paper we provide an overview of our representation framework and demonstrate its applicability to syntactic annotation. We show how the framework can contribute to comparative evaluation and merging of parser output and diverse syntactic annotation schemes. 1 Introduction It is widely recognized that the proliferation of annotation schemes runs counter to the need to re-use language resources, and that standards for linguistic annotation are becoming increasingly mandatory. In particular, there is a need for a general framework for linguistic annotation that is flexible and extensible enough to accommodate different annotation types and different theoretical and practical approaches, while at the same time enabling their representation in a �pivot� format that can serve as the basis for comparative evaluation of parser output, such as PARSEVAL (Harrison, et al., 1991), as well as the development of reusable editing and processing tools. To answer this need, we have developed a representation framework comprised of an abstract model for a variety of different annotation types (e.g., morpho-syntactic tagging, syntactic annotation, co-reference annotation, etc.), which can be instantiated in different ways depending on the annotator�s approach and goals. We have implemented both the abstract model and various instantiations using XML schemas (Thompson, et al., 2000), the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) (Lassila and Swick, 2000) and RDF schemas (Brickley and Guha, 2000), which enable description and definition of abstract data models together with means to interpret, via the model, information encoded according to different conventions. The results have been incorporated into XCES (Ide, et al., 2000a), part of the EAGLES Guidelines developed by the Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES)1. The XCES provides a ready-made, standard encoding format together with a data architecture designed specifically for linguistically annotated corpora. In this paper we provide an overview of our representation framework and demonstrate its applicability to syntactic annotation. The framework has been applied to the representation of terminology (Terminological Markup Framework2, ISO project n.16642) and computational lexicons (Ide, et al., 2000b), thus demonstrating its general applicability for a variety of linguistic annotation types. We also show how the framework can contribute to 1 http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES/home.html 2 http://www.loria.fr/projects/TMF comparison and merging of diverse syntactic annotation schemes. 2 Current Practice At the highest level of abstraction, syntactic annotation schemes represent the following •kinds of information: Category information: labeling of components based on syntactic category (e.g., noun phrase, prepositional phrase), syntactic role (subject, object), …

Content truncated to 500 words