Representation and Interchange of Linguistic Annotation. An In-Depth, Side-by-Side Comparison of Three Designs

Richard Eckart de Castilho, Nancy Ide, Emanuele Lapponi, Stephan Oepen, Keith Suderman, Erik Velldal, Marc Verhagen


Abstract
For decades, most self-respecting linguistic engineering initiatives have designed and implemented custom representations for various layers of, for example, morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis. Despite occasional efforts at harmonization or even standardization, our field today is blessed with a multitude of ways of encoding and exchanging linguistic annotations of these types, both at the levels of ‘abstract syntax’, naming choices, and of course file formats. To a large degree, it is possible to work within and across design plurality by conversion, and often there may be good reasons for divergent design reflecting differences in use. However, it is likely that some abstract commonalities across choices of representation are obscured by more superficial differences, and conversely there is no obvious procedure to tease apart what actually constitute contentful vs. mere technical divergences. In this study, we seek to conceptually align three representations for common types of morpho-syntactic analysis, pinpoint what in our view constitute contentful differences, and reflect on the underlying principles and specific requirements that led to individual choices. We expect that a more in-depth understanding of these choices across designs may led to increased harmonization, or at least to more informed design of future representations.
Anthology ID:
W17-0808
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Nathan Schneider, Nianwen Xue
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
67–75
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-0808
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-0808
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Richard Eckart de Castilho, Nancy Ide, Emanuele Lapponi, Stephan Oepen, Keith Suderman, Erik Velldal, and Marc Verhagen. 2017. Representation and Interchange of Linguistic Annotation. An In-Depth, Side-by-Side Comparison of Three Designs. In Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 67–75, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Representation and Interchange of Linguistic Annotation. An In-Depth, Side-by-Side Comparison of Three Designs (Eckart de Castilho et al., LAW 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-0808.pdf