A Corpus Representation Format for Linguistic Web Services: The D-SPIN Text Corpus Format and its Relationship with ISO Standards
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010)
Abstract
In the framework of the preparation of linguistic web services for corpus processing, the need for a representation format was felt, which supports interoperability between different web services in a corpus processing pipeline, but also provides a well-defined interface to both, legacy tools and their data formats and upcoming international standards. We present the D-SPIN text corpus format, TCF, which was designed for this purpose. It is a stand-off XML format, inspired by the philosophy of the emerging standards LAF (Linguistic Annotation Framework) and its ``instances'' MAF for morpho-syntactic annotation and SynAF for syntactic annotation. Tools for the exchange with existing (best practice) formats are available, and a converter from MAF to TCF is being tested in spring 2010. We describe the usage scenario where TCF is embedded and the properties and architecture of TCF. We also give examples of TCF encoded data and describe the aspects of syntactic and semantic interoperability already addressed.