Managing Metadata Variability within a Hierarchy of Annotation Schemas

Abstract

The paper describes the theoretical basis of the ALPE1 model, a hierarchy of annotation formats used to guide the automatic computation of processing flows capable of performing complex linguistic processing tasks. The hierarchy is comprised of a core, which is a direct acyclic graph whose nodes represent XML annotation formats, and a halo which contains additional annotation formats. The core hierarchy also serves as a standardization hub for annotated documents. The focus of the paper is the description of the new additions to the model, allowing the integration and usage of non-XML formats in processing flows and new equivalence relations between XML formats. This type of hierarchy is implemented in the ALPE system, which is also briefly described in the paper.