1 Supporting linguistic annotation using XML

Large-scale linguistic annotation is currently employed for a wide range of purposes, including comparing communication under different conditions, testing psycholinguistic hypotheses, and training natural language engines. Current software support for linguistic annotation is poor, with much of it written for one-off tasks using special purpose data representations and data handling routines. This impedes research because software cannot be reused and the resulting annotations can be difficult to use in analyses or applications for which they were not originally intended. This paper argues for a particular vision of how support for linguistic annotation could be provided using XML as the data format and stylesheets as the processing mechanism.