Towards an integrated representation of multiple layers of linguistic annotation in multilingual corpora

There has been an increasing interest in recent years in the enrichment of natural language corpora in terms of annotation with explicit linguistic information. This interest manifests itself most prominently in two areas of linguistics: corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. For corpus linguistics, the long standing practice has been to work on raw, i.e., unannotated text. While raw corpora are basically fine for some kinds of linguistic work, notably for lexicology and lexicography, for other kinds of linguistic analysis tasks, e.g., for syntactic or semantic analysis, the information that needs to be extracted is not readily derivable from raw text. Thus, corpora have to be annotated with linguistic categories in order to be able to extract the desired kinds of information. For such annotation to be practicable at all, the annotation process needs to be carried out automatically or at least semi-automatically.