XML/SGML and Computational Linguistics

This page includes a collection of links on pages related to the XML (and SGML) standard and its use in the field of (computational) linguistics. Comments and descriptions taken from the respective web pages are meant to simplify orientation. (Many thanks to Eduardo Torres for his help in preparing this page).

1. Homepages of groups, standards, organizations and initiatives

• LDC Linguistic Data Consortium: Linguistic Annotation The LDC supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources: data, tools and standards. The page describes tools and formats for creating and managing linguistic annotations. `Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, "named entity" identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. The focus is on tools which have been widely used for constructing annotated linguistic databases, and on the formats commonly adopted by such tools and databases. (The page includes a large index with many links to workshops, projects and research groups.)
• EAGLES Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards The Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES) is an initiative of the European Commission, within DG XIII Linguistic Research and Engineering programme, which aims to accelerate the provision of standards for:
  • Very large-scale language resources (such as text corpora, computational lexicons and speech corpora);
  • Means of manipulating such knowledge, via computational linguistic formalisms, mark up languages and various software tools;
  • Means of assessing and evaluating resources, tools and products.
  Numerous well-known companies, research centres, universities and professional bodies across the European Union are collaborating under the aegis of EC DGXIII to produce the EAGLES Guidelines which set out recommendations for de facto standards and for good practice in the above areas of language engineering. The EAGLES initiative is coordinated by Consorzio Pisa Ricerche, Pisa, Italy which also manages the EAGLES home page and the EAGLES ftp server. The work towards common specifications is carried out by five working groups:
  • Text Corpora
  • Computational Lexicons
  • Grammar Formalisms
  • Evaluation
  • Spoken Language
  These are concerned with firstly establishing common methodologies for the five areas of concern within EAGLES, in order to subsequently arrive at de facto standards. The Corpus Encoding Standard (CES) and its XML version (XCES), links see below, are standards developed by EAGLES.
• CES Corpus Encoding Standard This document is the first version of the Corpus Encoding Standard (CES), which are a part of the EAGLES Guidelinesdeveloped by the Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (EAGLES). The CES is designed to be optimally suited for use in language engineering research and applications, in order to serve as a widely accepted set of encoding standards for corpus-based work in natural language processing applications. The CES is an application of SGML (ISO 8879:1986, Information Processing--Text and Office Systems--Standard Generalized Markup Language) compliant with the specifications of the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange of the Text Encoding Initiative.
• XCES The XML-version of the CES-Standard (see above). Provides links to DTDs for documents, aligned data, annotated data.
• OASIS Organization for the advancement of structured information OASIS is a non-profit, international consortium that creates interoperable industry specifications based on public standards such as XML and SGML. OASIS members include organizations and individuals who provide, use and specialize in implementing the technologies that make these standards work in practice.
• OASIS links to XML applications and projects Offers links to an enormous number of projects and applications, including many of the links to be find here.
• NLSML Natural Language Semantics Markup Language See also NLSML
• XML for bibliographic references
• VocML Vocabulary Markup Language
• Taxonomic Markup Language
• Description Logics Markup Language
• Text Encoding Initiative The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an international project to develop guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts for scholarly research, and to satisfy a broad range of uses by the language industries more generally. The Web-Page provides information on history, organization, TEI applications, guidelines, tutorials etc.
• XML and TEI OASIS page with Links to XML topics within TEI. See also Academic Applications
• XLT: XML representation of Lexicons and Terminologies XLT is an XML-based application developed with the intent of facilitating the exchange of lexicons and terminologies. The primary member of the XLT family of formats is Default XLT Format (DXLT). (Page includes links to specification, tutorials, projects (SALT = Standards-based Access service to multilingual Lexicons and Terminologies). SALT-page includes deliverables and papers.)
• LACITO Linguistic Data Archiving Project The goals of the LACITO linguistic data archiving project are the conservation and the distribution of speech data. To these ends it has developed norms for the preparation and exploitation of documents incorporating sound and text using internationally recognized standards (SGML and XML).
• SABLE V1.0 The draft SABLE specification is an initiative to establish a standard system for marking up text input to speech synthesizers. The current draft (version 1.0) is being circulated for comment by users, developers and researchers of speech synthesis.
• MATE The MATE (Multilevel Annotation, Tools Engineering) project aims to facilitate re-use of language resources by addressing the problems of creating, acquiring, and maintaining language corpora. The problems are addressed along two lines:
  • through the development of a standard for annotating resources;
  • through the provision of tools which will make the processes of knowledge acquisition and extraction more efficient.
  Specifically, MATE will treat spoken dialogue corpora at multiple levels, focusing on prosody, (morpho-) syntax, co-reference, dialogue acts, and communicative difficulties, as well as inter-level interaction. The results of the project will be of particular benefit to developers of spoken language dialogue systems but will also be directly useful for other applications of language engineering. Partners: Odense, Torino, Barcelona, DFKI Saarbruecken, Edinburgh, Stuttgart, Pisa, Madrid. Page includes links to deliverables, publications, partners, project description etc.
• CELLAR -- Computing Environment for Linguistic, Literary, and Anthropological Research CELLAR is an object-oriented database system that is being developed by the Academic Computing Department of SIL to meet the data management needs of our field workers. Two of its special features are the ability to cope simultaneously with data in many languages, and design which separates the conceptual model of a data set from multiple (interchangeable) views for display and encoding formats for import and export. While important aspects of the design were motivated by the needs of linguistic research, the system is fully programmable and can be used to develop text-related (as opposed to number crunching) applications for any discipline. Applications include phonological analysis, interlinear text analysis, lexical database management and others. (Page includes links to technical overview and papers
• SGML: ECI (European Corpus Initiative) ``The European Corpus Initiative was founded to oversee the acquisition and preparation of a large multi-lingual corpus to be made available in digital form for scientific research at cost and without royalties. We believe that widespread easy access to such material would be a great stimulus to scientific research and technology development as regards language and language technology. . . . No amount of abstract argument as to the value of corpus material is as powerful as the experience of actually having access to some in one's laboratory.''
• ATLAS Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems ATLAS is a recent initiative involving NIST , LDC and MITRE . ATLAS addresses an array of applications needs spanning corpus construction, evaluation infrastructure, and multi-modal visualization. The principal goal of ATLAS is to provide powerful abstractions over annotation tools and formats in order to maximize flexibility and extensibility. Our approach has been to isolate and abstract over the physical and logical levels of annotation tools and formats, leaving application- and domain-specific issues to the side. ATLAS Level 0, also known as Annotation Graphs, provides a data model for working with linear signals (such as text and audio) indexed by intervals. ATLAS Level 1 is a generalized model, suitable for annotating signals of essentially arbitrary dimensionality with annotations having essentially arbitrary structure. An early application of ATLAS Level 1 is OCR annotation, where textual images are indexed using bounding boxes. Both models utilize an XML-based interchange format for data storage and exchange and a set of Application Programming Interfaces for data manipulation. Currently, there is a Beta release of the API to support access to, and manipulation of Level 0 data structures. Development of the API to support Level 1 data is in its initial stages. (Page includes links to persons, documents, papers, tutorial.)
• Transcriber A tool for segmenting, labeling and transcribing speech
• The XML Cover Pages - Home Page (XML page including overview and links on XML applications in many fields. )
• The official site of RELAX RELAX (REgular LAnguage description for XML) is a specification for describing XML-based languages. XHTML 1.0, for example, can be described in RELAX. A description written in RELAX is called a RELAX grammar. An XML document can be verified against a RELAX grammar. Compared with DTD(Document Type Definition), RELAX has new features:
  • RELAX grammars are represented in the XML instance syntax
  • RELAX borrows rich datatypes of XML Schema Part 2
  • RELAX is namespace-aware
  RELAX is standardized by INSTAC XML SWG of Japan. Under the auspices of the Japanese Standard Association(JSA), this committee develops Japanese national standards for XML.
• Academia Sinica Computing Centre's Schematron Home Page The Schematron differs in basic concept from other schema languages in that it not based on grammars but on finding tree patterns in the parsed document.

2. Some Articles

Im Internet

• Creating a Parallel Corpus from the ``Book of 2000 Tongues''
• An XML Information Retrieval Model - A Component based Approach.
• WInter (Web Internationalization & Multilinguism) Internet-Draft
• XML Markup Technologies for Working with Linguistic Data
• CREATING AND USING A MULTILINGUAL PARALLEL CONCORDANCER
• Encoding and Parallel alignment of linguistic corpora in six Central and Eastern European Languages
• SGML/XML Special Topics
• General SGML/XML Applications
• Hedge automata: a formal model for XML schemata
• DTD Transformation by Patterns and Contextual Conditions
• SGML: Syntax for regular-but-non-local schemata
• Formalizing SGML and XML Instances and Schemata with Forest Automata Theory
• Why I demand Schemata: Element Type Hierarchies for Transparent Document Structure Definition
• JA: IPM, March 97
• Korpuslinguistik und große einsprachige Wörterbücher
• XML.com: What is RDF? [Jan. 24, 2001]
• SABLE: A STANDARD FOR TTS MARKUP
• XML Schema Tutorial
• Markup Guidelines for Documentary Editions.
• Textual Criticism and the Text Encoding Initiative
• Mapping from objects to markup: a springboard for multiple-strategy electronic publishing

Local

Im Verzeichnis ~torres/XML, PS- und PDF- formatiert.

• The MATE Workbench - an annotation tool for XML coded speech corpora. D. McKelvie et al.
• XML tools and architecture for Named Entity recognition. A. Mikheev et al
• Structured Document Transformations. Greger Linden
• SGML & XML Content Models. Pekka Kilpeläinen.
• Automatic Hypertext Link Typing, James Allan
• Die integrierte Repräsentation linguistischer Daten. A. Mengel.
• Automatically generating hypertext by computing semantic similarity, Green
• Hedge automata: a formal model for XML schemata, M. Murata
• Moddellierung multilingualer Ressourcen, Heyer, Wolff
• Towards a minimal standard for dialogue transcripts: a new SGML architecture for the HCRC Map Task Corpus, A. Isard et al.
• ATLAS: A Flexible and Extensible Architecture for Linguistic Annotation, S. Bird et al.
• An XML-based representation format for syntactically annotated corpora, A. Mengel, W. Lezius
• PAT expressions: an algebra for text search, A. Salminen
• CELLAR: A Data Modelleing System for Linguistic Annotation
• SSML: a Speech Synthesis Markup Language, P. TAylor, A. Isard
• Automatic Hypertext Construction, Allan
• SGML: Mathematical and Philosophical Issues, Wood
• Transcriber: development and use of a tool for assisting speech coprpora production, C. Barras et al.
• XCES: an XML-Based Encoding Standard for Linguistic Corpora, Nancy Ide et al.

3. Further links

(e.g. proceedings, literature, pages including collection of links, etc).

General

• Text Encoding with SGML/XML: CES collection of links
• CORPUS LINGUISTICS 2001 Programme.
• Henning Lobin (Hrsg.): Text im digitalen Medium
• Recent LTG Publications
• Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)
• Henning Lobin - Linguistik: Die Bielefelder Sicht
• SGML: Foundations of Markup, HTML, and SGML
• UMCP: CLIS: LBSC 878 ISAR: Fall 99: Core Reading List
• Diffuse -- IST Semantic Web Technologies Workshop -- November 2000

Homepages of some Researchers

• Andreas' Veröffentlichungen
• Jost Gippert: Publications
• Angelika Storrer: Publikationen
• Homepage of Greger Linden
• Henning Lobin - Homepage