LingSIG in Graz, Sep 2019

The LingSIG is going to meet on Tuesday the 17th at 4 pm, in Seminar Room LS 15.03. The meeting is scheduled to last 1.5 hrs, and will end just in time for us to transfer to the conference opening.

The topics to be covered include:

• report on LingSIG activities in the past year
• information/poll on existing linguistics-related standardisation activities that involve the TEI
• information on the ongoing ParlaTEI effort by CLARIN researchers
• query/poll on the further extension of word-level grammatical annotation (@norm and @orig)
• information on the ongoing standoff-annotation-related activity
• ... (please bring other topics with you or submit them to the LingSIG list)

SIG Report

Below is the report that was sent to the Chair of the Technical Council, with an addition at the end.

The LingSIG met on 17.09 with 9 people in attendance. The meeting was convened by Piotr Banski, with Andreas Witt sending his apologies due to being tied up at the same time at a meeting of the CLARIN Board of Directors.

The participants have briefly presented their TEI-related linguistic work done in the year since the last TEI Conference. Piotr has informed the LingSIG about the current TEI-related initiatives ongoing and starting at ISO TC37 SC4 and within CLARIN. Tomaz Erjavec has briefly presented the Parla-CLARIN initiative, which led to discussion on the extent to which it is worthwhile to provide translation tools from other formats at this stage of the initiative (it is sometimes worth to bring in interesting use cases), and to discussion on the @msd attribute that is part of att.linguistic and that lacks the ability to point to extended description provided by feature structures. It has been suggested that, by analogy to lemmaRef, msdRef could be introduced into att.linguistic.

Another point of discussion concerned the postulated addition of the @orig and @norm attributes to the set of basic descriptors at the level of the word. Jack Bowers reminded the group of ticket #1776 postulating the addition of <w> to att.lexicographic. Piotr mentioned that, together with Susanne Haaf, they have been planning to propose a new class, call it "att.normalization", providing the @norm and @orig attributes to both att.lexicographic and att.linguistic (this way, <w> does not get the entire baggage of att.lexicographic as a cumbersome bonus). Piotr mentioned several cases being made for that in the past year on the TEI-L and github, with well-defined use cases provided by Marin Mueller coming from the MorphAdorned archive of Early Modern English that Martin maintains.

Next, Laurent Romary and Piotr presented the Council's decision made at a meeting held on the previous day, concerning the content and the context of the standOff element. It will be interesting to see if the proposed handling of standOff can be strengthened with actual use cases. Apart from this, the existing stdfSpec github repository, maintained by Laurent and now used by several projects, will now be an alternative TEI customisation (and it should be relatively straightforward to provide scripts for the translation to the newest Council proposal, should someone need such a translation).

The resolutions of the meeting are as follows:

• to introduce a ticket proposing @msdRef
• to finalize work on the existing ticket #1776 concerning @norm and @orig
• to inform the linguistic community of the new standOff proposal and encourage people to try and encode linguistic standoff annotations in it, and to provide feedback on that to the Council (possibly via LingSIG)

(What we missed while formulating the resolutions at the end of the meeting is a point raised by Lou Burnard concerning the place in the header where documentation for the specialized attributes can be stored. Please let us keep this very important issue in mind as the next LingSIG task.)