About me

Caveats and assumptions

Caveats

• By training I am a scholar, but by profession I am a programmer, principally in XSLT and C#.
• I’m not a linguist. My understanding of linguistics is shaped by Greek, Latin, English, Syriac, Coptic.
• In participating in LingSIG, I want to support (not determine) the direction linguists take.

Assumptions

• You know what TEI (and therefore XML) is.
• You know what linked open data/RDF is.
• You know what lexico-morphology is.
• You know what a highly inflected language looks like.

Current TEI

Simple inline annotations

<p>
 <w pos="PNP">We</w>
 <w pos="VBB” join="left">'re</w>
 <w pos="VVG">going</w>
 <w pos="PRP">on</w>
 <w pos="NN1">vacation</w>
 <pc pos="PUN” join="left">.</pc>
</p>
                        

Stand-off annotations

• Use of ids in the text
• Linguistic annotations are elsewhere in the same document
• Annotations point to the text via id refs

Some issues

• Not quite LOD-ready (e.g., code “PNP” = what IRI?)
• Hidden assumptions about the given tagging scheme or language (e.g., “because” = conj. or prep.?)
• Different projects means different language models, codes
• How do I encode ambiguity, or alternatives?
  • “Get down off a duck” (“down” = adverb or noun)
  • “ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.” = “deliver us from evil” or “...evil one”? (masc. or neut.)

Some other TEI issues

• Laissez faire
• Pointers, syntax are project-oriented
• teiHeader can be rambling, confusing, not LOD-friendly.
• Encourages repetition, redundancy
• Publishing aside, applications and tools are DIY, project-specific
• etc.

Current non-TEI

Some issues

• Different syntax (a--s---ng- vs A1A GSN vs A- ----GSN-)
• Some differences in morphological taxonomies (vocative deprecated)
• Not LOD/RDF-ready (but could be)
• Slightly dirty data

Principle-based desiderata

• A linguistic annotation is a claim, not a fact.
• A claimant (person/algorithm) makes a linguistic claim about some text at a particular time, with some level of confidence, using a syntax governed by rules determined by a linguistic perspective.
• Each emphasized factor above deserves support in our TEI files.
• The customary RDF triple is inadequate (RDF* perhaps not).

Vocabulary: TAN-voc

Examples

• Licenses: Creative Commons → TAN
• Grammatical features: OLiA → TAN
• Other TAN built-in vocabulary

Features

• Many <IRI>s encouraged: synonymity principle.
• The <name> serves as an id for any linking file.
• Any given file can add another, usually terser id, locally valent.
• Every id/idref implicitly invokes the IRIs of the underlying concept.

Lexicomorphological rules: TAN-mor

Examples

• English Brown
• English Penn
• Greek Perseus positional
• Greek Perseus readable (in progress)

Features

• Choose the syntax you like, either positional or non-positional.
• Declare rules for the usage of the syntax, with different levels of warning.

Linguistic annotations: TAN-A-lm

Examples: text-specific

• Ring-a-ring-a-roses
• Aristotle's Categories
• Several bibles: Greek Septuagint (Rahlfs), Greek New Testament, Syriac New Testament

Examples: language-specific

• Perseus Greek (1,787 files)
• Perseus Latin (2,138 files)

Examples: text distilled to language-specific

• Greek Septuagint
• Greek New Testament

Features

• Fully resolvable to LOD
• Responsive to TAN-mor rules
• Schematron Quick Fixes allow handy edits
• Duplication can be reduced

Putting it together

Rich lexicomorphological data is valuable

• alignment
• stylometry
• Quotation detection (Tangram)

Pros and cons

Cons

• *Time-consuming, memory-consumptive to create
• *Time-consuming to edit
• *Validating long, complex texts or annotations can be processor-intensive, memory-consumptive
• Not always convenient (sometimes standoff data is a headache)
• *Vocabulary hard to traverse in functions

Pros

• Tiny errors can be found and fixed
• Greater cross-project interoperability is possible
• RDF- and RDF*-conversant
• A model for the future
• For applications, sky is the limit
• Access of the largest XSLT function libraries

Status

• 2021 version stable
• 2021 EADH workshop
• I am taking time off to recharge
• Liberal license (steal my code, please)

An idea

• LingSIG community Schematron file(s)
• Validates files
• Provides editorial assistance (Schematron Quick Fixes)
• Core library behind validation can be repurposed for applications.