A LAF/GrAF based Encoding Scheme for underspecified Representations of syntactic Annotations

Data models and encoding formats for syntactically annotated text corpora need to deal with syntactic ambiguity; underspecified representations are particularly well suited for the representation of ambiguous data because they allow for high informational efficiency. We discuss the issue of being informationally efficient, and the trade-off between efficient encoding of linguistic annotations and complete documentation of linguistic analyses. The main topic of this article is a data model and an encoding scheme based on LAF/GrAF (Ide and Romary, 2006; Ide and Suderman, 2007) which provides a flexible framework for encoding underspecified representations. We show how a set of dependency structures and a set of TiGer graphs (Brants et al., 2002) representing the readings of an ambiguous sentence can be encoded, and we discuss basic issues in querying corpora which are encoded using the framework presented here.