Anatomy of Annotation Schemes: Mapping to GrAF

In this paper, we apply the annotation scheme design methodology defined in (Bunt, 2010) and demonstrate its use for generating a mapping from an existing annotation scheme to a representation in GrAF format. The most important features of this methodology are (1) the distinction of the abstract and concrete syntax of an annotation language; (2) the specification of a formal semantics for the abstract syntax; and (3) the formalization of the relation between abstract and concrete syntax, which guarantees that any concrete syntax inherits the semantics of the abstract syntax, and thus guarantees meaning-preserving mappings between representation formats. By way of illustration, we apply this mapping strategy to annotations from ISOTimeML, PropBank, and FrameNet.