A Concise Query Language with Search and Transform Operations for Corpora with Multiple Levels of Annotation

Anil Kumar Singh


Abstract
The usefulness of annotated corpora is greatly increased if there is an associated tool that can allow various kinds of operations to be performed in a simple way. Different kinds of annotation frameworks and many query languages for them have been proposed, including some to deal with multiple layers of annotation. We present here an easy to learn query language for a particular kind of annotation framework based on ‘threaded trees', which are somewhere between the complete order of a tree and the anarchy of a graph. Through 'typed' threads, they can allow multiple levels of annotation in the same document. Our language has a simple, intuitive and concise syntax and high expressive power. It allows not only to search for complicated patterns with short queries but also allows data manipulation and specification of arbitrary return values. Many of the commonly used tasks that otherwise require writing programs, can be performed with one or more queries. We compare the language with some others and try to evaluate it.
Anthology ID:
L12-1551
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1490–1497
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/919_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anil Kumar Singh. 2012. A Concise Query Language with Search and Transform Operations for Corpora with Multiple Levels of Annotation. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1490–1497, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Concise Query Language with Search and Transform Operations for Corpora with Multiple Levels of Annotation (Singh, LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/919_Paper.pdf