This paper presents the IULA Spanish LSP Treebank, a dependency treebank of over 41,000 sentences of different domains (Law, Economy, Computing Science, Environment, and Medicine), developed in the framework of the European project METANET4U. Dependency annotations in the treebank were automatically derived from manually selected parses produced by an HPSG-grammar by a deterministic conversion algorithm that used the identifiers of grammar rules to identify the heads, the dependents, and some dependency types that were directly transferred onto the dependency structure (e.g., subject, specifier, and modifier), and the identifiers of the lexical entries to identify the argument-related dependency functions (e.g. direct object, indirect object, and oblique complement). The treebank is accessible with a browser that provides concordance-based search functions and delivers the results in two formats: (i) a column-based format, in the style of CoNLL-2006 shared task, and (ii) a dependency graph, where dependency relations are noted by an oriented arrow which goes from the dependent node to the head node. The IULA Spanish LSP Treebank is the first technical corpus of Spanish annotated at surface syntactic level following the dependency grammar theory. The treebank has been made publicly and freely available from the META-SHARE platform with a Creative Commons CC-by licence.

Due to the increase in the number and depth of analyses required over the text, like entity recognition, POS tagging, syntactic analysis, etc. the annotation in-line has become unpractical. In Natural Language Processing (NLP) some emphasis has been placed in finding an annotation method to solve this problem. A possibility is the standoff annotation. With this annotation style it is possible to add new levels of annotation without disturbing exiting ones, with minimal knock on effects. This annotation will increase the possibility of adding more linguistic information as well as more possibilities for sharing textual resources. In this paper we present a tool developed in the framework of the European Metanet4u (Enhancing the European Linguistic Infrastructure, GA 270893) for creating a multi-layered XML annotation scheme, based on the GrAF proposal for standoff annotations.