# A stand-off XML-TEI representation of reference annotation

Aria Adli, Eric Engel, Laurent Romary, Fahime Same

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To cite this version:

Aria Adli, Eric Engel, Laurent Romary, Fahime Same. A stand-off XML-TEI representation of reference annotation. DGfS 2018: 40. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, Mar 2018, Stuttgart, Germany. 2017. hal-01876327

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Submitted on 18 Sep 2018

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# A stand-off XML-TEI representation of reference annotation

Aria Adli¹, Eric Engel¹, Laurent Romary², Fahime Same¹

¹University of Cologne, ²INRIA
{aria.adli, eric.engel, f同一个}@uni-koeln.de, laurent.romary@inria.fr

## Background and previous work

* Multilingual corpus project on French, Spanish, Persian, and Catalan

* Spontaneous speech data elicited in a game task

* More info: www.sgscorpus.com

* Building on extensive work on (stand-off) representation of referring expressions and referential links [4,6] and types of links [5]

* So far, no existing models making a clean distinction between expression-related and entity-related features and links

## What's new?

* Reference annotation is an essential element in corpus-linguistic research at the interface of syntax and discourse structure.

* We propose a representation based on a semantically plausible model distinguishing referring expressions, discourse referents, and links.

* Neater representation of grammatical vs. semantic features and of phenomena of indirect reference ("bridging")

* More efficient annotation of longer stretches of natural discourse

* Integrated in a multilayer stand-off annotation in compliance with TEI-ISO standards: MAF [1], SynAF [2], RAF [3]

## Example

(Persian, Interview 12, line 121):
(1) dAdAS-eS-o doxtar-eS ke az SahrestAn umade budan. brother-3SG.P POSS-and daughter-3SG.P POSS C-TOP from province came 'His brother and his daughter came from the province.'

## Links

<so:standOff type="reference">

<so:listAnnotation type="link">
  <linkGrp type="objectalLink">
    <link xml: id="link1" target="#ent1 #ent4" ana= "#link1-ana"/>
    <link xml: id="link2" target="#ent3 #ent4" ana= "#link2-ana"/>
  </linkGrp>
  <fs xml: id="link1-ana"><symbol value="subset"/></fs>
  <fs xml: id="link2-ana"><symbol value="subset"/></fs>
</so:listAnnotation>

## Discourse referents

<so:listAnnotation type="discourseEntity">
  <interpGrp>
    <interp xml: id="ent1" inst= "#ref1" ana= "ent1-ana">brother_of_victim</interp>
    <interp xml: id="ent2" inst= "#ref2 #ref4" ana= "ent2-ana">victim</interp>
    <interp xml: id="ent3" inst= "#ref3" ana= "ent3-ana">daughter_of_victim</interp>
    <interp xml: id="ent4" inst= "#ref5" ana= "ent4-ana">brother_and_daughter</interp>
  </interpGrp>
  <fs xml: id="ent1-ana">
    <f name="animacy"><symbol value="human"/></fs>
    <f name="abstractness"><symbol value="concrete"/></fs>
  </fs>
  <!-- ... -->
  <fs xml: id="ent4-ana">
    <f name="animacy"><symbol value="human"/></fs>
    <f name="abstractness"><symbol value="concrete"/></fs>
  </fs>
</so:listAnnotation>

## Referring expressions

<so:listAnnotation type="referringExpression">
  <annotationBlock xml: id="ref-u-12-121" target= "#u-12-121">
    <spanGrp>
      <span xml: id="ref1" target= "#syn10" ana= "#ref1-ana"/>
      <span xml: id="ref2" target= "#syn2" ana= "#ref2-ana"/>
      <span xml: id="ref3" target= "#syn11" ana= "#ref3-ana"/>
      <span xml: id="ref4" target= "#syn5" ana= "#ref4-ana"/>
      <span xml: id="ref5" target= "#syn13" ana= "#ref5-ana"/>
    </spanGrp>
    <fs xml: id="ref1-ana">
      <f name="person"><symbol value="3"/></fs>
      <f name="grammaticalNumber"><symbol value="singular"/></fs>
      <f name="informationStatus"><symbol value="given"/></fs>
    </fs>
    <!-- ... -->
    <fs xml: id="ref5-ana">
      <f name="person"><symbol value="3"/></fs>
      <f name="grammaticalNumber"><symbol value="plural"/></fs>
      <f name="informationStatus"><symbol value="inferred"/></fs>
    </fs>
  </annotationBlock>
</so:listAnnotation>

</so:standOff>

## Reference

## Syntax

## Morphosyntax

## Transcription

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## Model features

* Separation of primary data (transcription) and secondary data (annotations)

* Incremental build-up of annotation layers

* Three-way distinction of reference-related features

* Local **grammatical features** (grammatical gender, number, person) and sentence-bound discourse features (information status) apply to **referring expressions**.

* Inherent **semantic features** of referents (animacy, cardinality, specificity, concreteness/abstractness) apply to the **referents**. Their values are constant over the entire discourse.

* **Relations between referents** (subset, partOf) are recognized as **permanent**, allowing for a better representation of so-called bridging phenomena in discourse.

## Future work

* User-friendly visualization and query interface (in ANNIS)

* Integration of different levels of information structure analysis

* [±topical] as feature of a referring expression?

* Markup of focus domains directly on syntactic phrases?

* Further expansion of the multilayer architecture to the analysis of other cross-sentential phenomena, e.g., rhetorical structure, dialogue analysis

Universität zu Köln

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SOCIOLINGUISTIC
LAB

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SFB 1252
PROMINENCE
IN LANGUAGE

informatiques mathématiques
Inria

## References

[1] ISO 24611:2012 Language resource management — Morpho-syntactic annotation framework (MAF).

[2] ISO 24615-1:2014 Language resource management — Syntactic annotation framework (SynAF) — Part 1: Syntactic model.

[3] ISO/AWI 24617-9 [Under development] Language resource management — Semantic annotation framework — Part 9: Reference Annotation Framework.

[4] Poesio, M., 2004. The MATE/GNOME proposals for anaphoric annotation, revisited. In *Proceedings of the 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue at HLT-NAACL 2004*, 154-162.

[5] Riester, A. and Baumann, S., 2017. The RefLex scheme - Annotation guidelines. *SinSpeC* 14. 1-31.

[6] Salmon-Alt, S. and Romary, L. 2005. The Reference Annotation Framework: A case for semantic content representation. In H. Bunt (ed.), *IWCS-6*, Tilburg, Netherlands: ACL SIGSEM.