A Common XML-based Framework for Syntactic Annotations

It is widely recognized that the proliferation of annotation schemes runs counter to the need to re-use language resources, and that standards for linguistic annotation are becoming increasingly mandatory. To answer this need, we have developed a framework comprised of an abstract model for a variety of different annotation types (e.g., morpho-syntactic tagging, syntactic annotation, co-reference annotation, etc.), which can be instantiated in different ways depending on the annotator's approach and goals. In this paper we provide an overview of the framework, demonstrate its applicability to syntactic annotation, and show how it can contribute to comparative evaluation of parser output and diverse syntactic annotation schemes.