Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
Issue 3 | November 2012

TEI and Linguistics

Editorial Introduction to the Third Issue
Piotr Bański, Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi and Andreas Witt

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/544
DOI: 10.4000/jtei.544
ISSN: 2162-5603
Publisher
TEI Consortium
Electronic reference
Piotr Bański, Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi and Andreas Witt, « Editorial Introduction to the ThirdIssue », Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 3 | November 2012, Online since 05
November 2012, connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jtei/544 ; DOI :10.4000/jtei.544

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Editorial Introduction to the Third Issue

Editorial Introduction to the ThirdIssue
Piotr Bański, Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi and Andreas Witt1

Linguistics had a strong presence at the TEI’s beginnings, being represented by names as
significant as those of Nancy Ide, Donald E. Walker, and Antonio Zampolli. Linguistics wasmentioned explicitly in the names of two of its three founding organizations: Associationfor Computers and the Humanities, Association for Computational Linguistics, andAssociation for Literary and Linguistic Computing. It was the main focus of one of thefour initial committees (http://www.tei-c.org/Vault/AB/abj01.txt) and, within several
years of the inception of the work on the TEI Guidelines, the British National Corpus
clearly demonstrated the TEI’s usefulness for encoding language resources.

2While the TEI proved successful in annotating basic grammatical information in an in-line
fashion, by the time the BNC was compiled there was a rapid development in corpus
studies, directed not only at the volume of primary data but also at annotations that
gradually began to provide information beyond part-of-speech categorization andlemmatization. Architectures were needed which would provide simple and fast
deployment, describing exactly the information that was needed without the overhead ofextra markup and using a flatter metadata structure. This is how specifications such as
CES (primarily for morphosyntactic and alignment annotation) and TigerXML (forsyntactic annotation, both hierarchical and relational) were developed and began to beadopted by the linguistic community.

3The early 2000s saw rapid development of language resources encoded in CES (Corpus
Encoding Standard) developed from TEI P3, and then XCES, as well as Tiger XML, both ofwhich exceeded the TEI in their popularity within tightly focused linguistic circles. It
should also be pointed out that, while the robust stand-off mechanisms of the TEI are still
being refined, CES and then XCES provided basic reference mechanisms which proved
extremely popular among corpus creators. Similar is the case of feature structure
markup: while the ISO/TEI feature structure schema offers numerous ways to encode
linguistic information (Witt et. al. 2009), in the absence of the feature structure validation
mechanisms, corpus builders adopted much simpler solutions.

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Editorial Introduction to the Third Issue

4

This state of affairs has gradually been changing: TEI P5, as a mature XML-based toolkit
that supports all the newest XML technologies, once again could be an important player
in the market of annotation standards (in the case of the TEI, a more precise phrase could
be annotation standard toolkits) and has recently been applied to encode major linguistic
enterprises such as the National Corpus of Polish, with its impressive stand-off
architecture featuring a number of separate annotation layers (Przepiórkowski andBański 2010).

5

The TEI special interest group for linguists (LingSIG), founded in 2010, has as its aim
making the TEI even more competitive in the area of linguistic annotation frameworks,
while maintaining close connections with the work performed at ISO TC37 SC4, the ISO
committee devoted to the management of language resources.

6

At the time of writing, the SIG has met twice (at the TEI conferences in Zadar and inWürzburg) where a series of micropresentations were offered on various topics
connecting the TEI and linguistics. It was also from the participants of the Würzburg
meeting that most submissions for the present issue were received.

7This issue begins with an overview of the current annotation standards landscape. “TheTEI and Current Standards for Structuring Linguistic Data: An Overview,” by Maik
Stührenberg, provides a remarkable summary of the most recent efforts to createinternational standards for the annotation of linguistic corpora, developed by the ISOtechnical committee for Terminology and other Language and Content Resources (ISO/TC37). This article opens a window onto the world of standards creation, detailing the steps
necessary for a set of protocols to become a standard, contrasting that with community
discussion-based specifications such as the TEI Guidelines, and showing how the latter
have been influential in the creation of de facto standards.

8The second paper, “A TEI P5 Document Grammar for the IDS Text Model,” by corpus
linguistics specialist Harald Lüngen and a veteran of both TEI and XML, C.M. SperbergMcQueen, presents the process of making the legacy data of DeReKo (DeutschesReferenzkorpus, the largest archive of German written text, collected at the IDS Mannheim
since 1964) compatible with the current version of TEI P5. The paper describes the steps
taken to encode the corpus since the early 1990s through a detailed analysis of the way
the IDS text model evolved to ultimately include the preparation of an ODD file which, inturn, documents the model.

9Gerhard Budin, Stefan Majewski, and Karlheinz Mörth write about a similar effort in thearea of dictionary encoding. Their paper describes the work of the Institute for Corpus
Linguistics and Text Technology (ICLTT) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in a numberof projects involving both the digitisation of print dictionaries and the creation of newborn-digital lexicographical data. The article explores how even within the restrictions
imposed by the TEI dictionary module, an attentive customisation with an eye tointeroperability with other standards and digital NLP tools makes TEI P5 a model that canbe applied over a variety of digitisation projects. The article touches on issues ofhierarchies, polyfunctionality of certain elements in the dictionary module, word-class
information, and interoperability of the markup schema with other digital frameworks.
The authors present the project’s experience in encoding morphosyntactic information,
linguistic varieties and writing systems, etymology, semantics, and specific production
metadata, ultimately proving the value of the customised TEI P5 dictionary module both

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Issue 3 | November 20122Editorial Introduction to the Third Issue

in the representation of digital dictionaries and the potential for use in NLP related
applications.
10“Consistent Modeling of Heterogeneous Lexical Structures” by Laurent Romary andWerner Wegstein highlights issues concerning the interoperability of a variety of data
sources in lexical data modelling. This article starts by underlining the difficulties arisingfrom building ad hoc data models from the TEI Guidelines’ Dictionaries chapter, which
inevitably leads to poor accessibility. The authors focus on lexical structures and proposea more generic methodology based on the concept of crystals, the smallest units in aconstruct that can help divide a document into regular chunks of information that can beprocessed more easily by external tools.

11Michael Beißwenger, Maria Ermakova, Alexander Geyken, Lothar Lemnitzer, andAngelika Storrer present a novel application of TEI P5 in the description of computermediated communication. Their paper, “A TEI Schema for the Representation ofComputer-mediated Communication,” introduces an XML schema which provides astructure for the encoding of the structural units of communication in not only forums,
blogs, and bulletin boards but also instant messaging, wikis, and twitter feeds, as well as
the annotation of these units. The paper offers an interesting view on the processing of a
new literary genre characterised by precise interaction features such as emoticons,interaction words, acronyms, and so on, and on the need for TEI P5 to cater for suchforms of text.

12Piotr Bański, Stefan Majewski, Maik Stührenberg, and Antonina Werthmann take on amore general issue relating to the social and infrastructural aspect of the SIG, and present
a proposal for integrating a TEI markup exporter into the general-purpose citation
manager Zotero. The paper provides a glimpse into the origins of the SIG’s online
presence and articulates a proposal for specific choices within TEI bibliographic elements
to suggest a coherent and interchangeable way of sharing and maintaining bibliographic
reference stores.

13

The guest editors of the volume wish to express their thanks to the authors and thereviewers, and acknowledge the work by the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative regular
editors, Susan Schreibman and Kevin Hawkins, in bringing the issue into uniform shape.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Przepiórkowski, Adam and Piotr Bański. 2011. “XML Text Interchange Format in the National
Corpus of Polish.” In Explorations across Languages and Corpora, edited by Stanisław GóźdźRoszkowski, 55–65. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Witt, Andreas, Georg Rehm, Erhard Hinrichs, Timm Lehmberg, and Jens Stegmann. 2009.
“SusTEInability of linguistic resources through feature structures.” Literary & Linguistic Computing
24 (3): 363–372. doi:10.1093/llc/fqp024.

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Issue 3 | November 20123