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The Linguistic Annotation Framework: a standard for annotation interchange and merging

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Abstract

This paper overviews the International Standards Organization–Linguistic Annotation Framework (ISO–LAF) developed in ISO TC37 SC4. We describe the XML serialization of ISO–LAF, the Graph Annotation Format (GrAF) and discuss the rationale behind the various decisions that were made in determining the standard. We describe the structure of the GrAF headers in detail and provide multiple examples of GrAF representation for text and multi-media. Finally, we discuss the next steps for standardization of interchange formats for linguistic annotations.

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Notes

  1. The Lexical Markup Language (LMF) (Francopoulo 2013).

  2. http://www.anc.org/OANC.

  3. http://www.cs.vassar.edu/CES/CES1.html.

  4. AG was subsequently augmented with ad hoc mechanisms to accommodate hierarchical relations, but these were never part of the underlying AG data model.

  5. Annotation Graphs allow nodes to be associated with locations in primary data, but not with other nodes in the graphs defined over the data.

  6. http://www.uml.org.

  7. See Neumann et al. (2013) for a description of the query and visualization tool ANNIS, which enables such queries over MASC data.

  8. The term “document” is applied broadly here to include physical artifacts other than text, and to allow for the possibility that a logical unit of primary data is distributed over multiple computer files.

  9. http://www.cs.vassar.edu/CES/CES1-3.html.

  10. http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/HD.html.

  11. The @attribute-name notation is used for XML attributes throughout the paper.

  12. Note that all anchor types are associated with one or more media, but a medium is not necessarily associated with an anchor type—in particular, media types associated with documents other than primary data documents (notably, annotation documents) are not associated with an anchor type.

  13. XPath is the XML Path Language defined by W3C; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/.

  14. The annotation documentation would be referenced in the annotation type declaration in the resource header.

  15. Note that the @type attribute on the region element specifies the anchor type and not the region type.

  16. Note that anchors into character data refer to locations between characters, not to the position of the characters themselves.

  17. Sentences may also be represented as annotations defined over tokens, but for some purposes it is less desirable to consider a sentence as an ordered set of tokens than as a single span of characters.

  18. Some detail concerning the html display has been omitted for brevity.

  19. http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/.

  20. http://www.graphviz.org/.

  21. http://www.anc.org/data/oanc.

  22. http://www.anc.org/data/masc/.

  23. http://www.anc.org/software/anc2go/.

  24. http://nltk.org.

  25. http://ifarm.nl/signll/conll/.

  26. http://www.graphviz.org.

  27. http://www.clarin.eu.

  28. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/graf-python/0.3.0.

  29. https://poio-api.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.

  30. http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/annis/.

  31. The ANNIS implementation for accessing MASC annotations is available from http://www.anc.org/software/annis.

  32. Note that the names of the object and features are much less important than the types of the objects and associated features.

  33. http://lapps.anc.org.

  34. http://langrid.nict.go.jp/.

  35. http://www.panacea-lr.eu/.

  36. http://www.clarin.eu.

  37. For more information see http://lapps.anc.org/web-service-exchange-vocabulary/.

  38. http://www.kyoto-project.eu/.

  39. http://www.ausnc.org.au/.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant INT-0753069.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA

    Nancy Ide & Keith Suderman

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Ide, N., Suderman, K. The Linguistic Annotation Framework: a standard for annotation interchange and merging. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48, 395–418 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-014-9268-1

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