WCCL Match - A Language for Text Annotation

摘要

In this paper we present a formalism for text annotation called WCCL Match. The need for a new formalism originates from our works related to Question Answering for Polish. We examined several existing formalisms to conclude that none of them fulfills our requirements. The new formalism was designed on top of an existing language for writing morphosyntactic functional expressions, namely WCCL. The major features of WCCL Match are: creation of new annotations, modification of existing ones, support for overlapping annotations, explicit access to tagset attributes and referring to context outside of captured annotation. We discuss three applications of the formalism: recognition of proper names, question analysis and question-to-query transformation. The implementation of WCCL Match is language-independent and can be used for almost any natural language.