Why TEI Stand-off Markup Authoring Needs Simplification

Procceedings of the 13th International Workshop on the Web and Databases - WebDB '10, 2010

For documents with complex or atypical annotations, multihierarchical structures play the role of the document tree in traditional XML documents. We define a model of overlapping or multihierarchical markup that has both a graphbased and a text-and-tags representation. Our model, which we call the range GODDAG, augments the classical GOD-DAG (generalized ordered-descendant DAG) structure with order relations over the nodes, and additional constraints that ensure documents have a convenient serialization in terms of tagged text. We provide two alternative constructions for this new model, and prove that documents in the model have (1) a unique representation as a graph, and (2) a straightforward textual representation that satisfies two conditions previously identified as important for serialization. Furthermore, we show how the range GODDAG provides a convenient way to characterize the update operations that may be performed on a document while maintaining serializability.

Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 1996

Linguistic analyses oftext corpora have contributed to the underStanding of natural language processing in both reading and writing. However, the impact oftext analysis in psycholinguistic research has been limited, mainly because the analyses hardly ever concern text structure. Existing modelsfor text structure analysis tend to rely heavily on analysts intuitions and world knowledge, and they are hardly formulated explicitly enough to be applied in an objective and reliable way. This paper discusses a procedure that aims at solving this indeterminacy for the domain of explanatory texts. We have formulated out intuitions about text structures in ordered sets ofproduction rules that constitute an analytic procedure. This procedure automatically builds structure representations in an incremental way, that is, clause-by-clause in a left-to-right manner. It makes well-defined use oflinguistic knowledge and hardly relies on world knowledge. Linguistic cues that play an important role in the linkingof text Segments are, amongothers, referential continuity (anaphors, lexicalreiteration), verb semantics, markers of coherence relations (connectives, temporal adverbs), sentenceform (ellision, Subordination) and position in the sentence frame (initial, final). To illustrate the workings of the procedure and the relevance of its products, results are presented ofprocedural analyses of a corpus of explanatory texts. The texts were first draft versions of essays written by 12-year-old children. The Output of the procedure (especially the hierarchical structure assigned to a text), appears to lead tofruitful insights into the cognitive representation of language users and has implications for research on writing proficiency, text quality, and text processing.

2003

The research goal of this dissertation is to point the way towards a better understanding for the hidden complexities of knowledge communication and content markup, with a view to cleaner, more principled designs. The following four specific contributions are shown to be particularly useful tools in the quest for understanding and improving the design of content markup languages: Linguistics parallel: Since human language is a high-quality existing solution to a generalization of the problem that ...

Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '91, 1991

Research on understanding linear texts has shown that comprehension and navigation mainly depend on the reader's ability to construct a coherent mental representation. While the author of a traditional document can use a variety of structural cues to support his readers in building up such a representation, the author of a hyperdocument faces a new problem. If he wants to ensure that his readers understand the entire hyperdocument as a coherent entity, he needs means to indicate its structure in a comprehensible way. In this paper, we propose a construction kit which provides dedicated design objects for this purpose. The design objects can be characterized as building blocks for three functionally different components of a hyperdocument: its content part, organizational part, and presentation part. In addition to the design objects, we propose some design rules which should guide the construction of coherent hyperdocuments.

This article considers page reform and the signifying presence of trees in human writing on and with paper. It was published in Huebener, P. & Szabo-Jones, L. (eds.) The Goose, vol 11.