Standoff Annotation for the Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank

This contribution presents the work in progress to convert the Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank (AGLDT) into standoff annotation using PAULA XML. With an increasing number of annotations of any kind, it becomes more and more urgent that annotations related to the same texts be added standoff. Standoff annotation consists in adding any kind of annotation in separate documents, which are ultimately linked to a main text, the so-called "base text," which is meant to be unchangeable. References occur via a graph-based system of IDs, which allows an annotation layer (contained in a separate file) to be linked to another annotation layer (contained in another separate file). All the annotations/files create a labeled directed acyclic graph, whose root is represented by the base text. Standoff annotation enables easy interoperability and extension, in that single annotation layers can reference other layers of annotation independently, thus overcoming the problem of conflicting hierarchies. Moreover, standoff annotation also allows addition of different annotations of the same kind to the same text (e.g., two different interpretations of the POS tag for a given token). In the present contribution, I show how the annotations of the AGLDT can become standoff using PAULA XML, which is an open access format following the LAF principles. More precisely, I show the case study of Caesar's De Bello Civili. I detail the PAULA XML files created for its tokenization and sentence split, which are preliminary required to add morphosyntactic annotation.