Construction and Annotation of Test-Items in DiET

We present an annotation tool, called GLOSS, that manifests the following features: accepts as inputs SGML source documents and/or their database images and produces as output source SGML documents as well as the associated database images; allows for simultaneous opening of more documents; can collapse independent annotation views of the same original document, which also allows for a layer-by-layer annotation process in different annotation sessions and by different annotators, including automatic; offers an attractive interface to the user; permits discourse structure annotation by offering a pair of building operations (adjoining and substitution) and remaking operations (undo, delete parent-child link and tree dismember). Finally we display an example that shows how GLOSS is employed to validate, using a corpus, a theory on global discourse.