A Common Framework for Syntactic Annotation

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 representation 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 annotatorÕs approach and goals. In this paper we provide an overview of our representation framework and demonstrate its applicability to syntactic annotation. We show how the framework can contribute to comparative evaluation and merging of parser output and diverse syntactic annotation schemes.