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`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focused on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, mai...

Declarative phonology is a program of research that was motivated in part by the need for theories of phonology that can be implemented on a computer. While it is clear that such a development would be beneficial for both theoretical and field phonology, it is not immediately obvious how one should go about implementing phonological models. The

this paper we present a finite-state model of phonology in which automata are the descriptions and tapes (or strings) are the objects being described. This provides the formal semantics for an autosegmental phonology without structure-changing rules. Logical operations on the phonological domain--such as conjunction, disjunction, and negation--make sense since the phonological domain consists of descriptions rather than objects. These operations as applied to automata are the straightforward operations of intersection, union, and complement. If the arrow in a rewrite rule is viewed as logical implication, then a phonological rule can also be represented as an automaton, albeit a less restrictive automaton than would be required for a lexical representation. The model is then compared with the transducer models for autosegmental phonology of Kay (1987), Kornai (1991), and Wiebe (1992). We conclude that the declarative approach to phonology presents an attractive way of extending finite-state techniques to autosegmental phonology while remaining within the confines of regular grammar

this paper we suggest some strategies for reuniting phonology and the rest of grammar in the context of a uniform constraint formalism. We explain why this is a desirable goal, and we present some conservative extensions to current practice in computational linguistics and in non-linear phonology which we believe are necessary and sufficient for achieving this goal. We begin by exploring the application of typed feature logic to phonology and propose a system of prosodic types. Next, taking HPSG as an exemplar of the grammar frameworks we have in mind, we show how the phonology attribute can be enriched, so that it can encode multi-tiered, hierarchical phonological representations. Finally, we exemplify the approach in some detail for the nonconcatenative morphology of Sierra Miwok and for schwa alternation in French. The approach taken in this paper lends itself particularly well to capturing phonological generalisations in terms of high-level prosodic constraints. 1. Phonology in Constraint-Based Grammar Classical generative phonology is couched within the same set of assumptions that dominated standard transformational grammar. Despite some claims that "derivations based on ordered rules (that is, external ordering) and incorporating intermediate structures are essential to phonology" (Bromberger & Halle, 1989:52), much recent work has tended towards a new model, frequently described in terms of constraints on well-formedness (Paradis, 1988; Goldsmith, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1993; Prince & Smolensky, 1993). While this work has an increasingly declarative flavour, most versions retain procedural devices for repairing representations that fail to meet certain constraints, or for constraints to override each other. This view is in marked contrast to the interpretation...

The multidimensional, heterogeneous, and temporal nature of speech databases raises interesting challenges for representation and query. Recently, annotation graphs have been proposed as a general-purpose representational framework for speech databases. Typical queries on annotation graphs require path expressions similar to those used in semistructured query languages. However, the underlying model is rather different from the customary graph models for semistructured data: the graph is acyclic and unrooted, and both temporal and inclusion relationships are important. We develop a query language and describe optimization techniques for an underlying relational representation. 1.

This paper investigates the incorporation of a non-procedural theory of phonology into HPSG, based on the 'one-level' model of Bird & Ellison (1992). The standard rule-representation distinction is replaced by the description-object distinction which is more germane in the context of constraint-based grammar. Prosodic domains, which limit the applicability of phonological constraints, are expressed in a prosodic type hierarchy modelled on HPSG'S lexical type hierarchy. Interactions between phonology and morphology and between phonology and syntax are discussed and exemplified I

This paper presents a simplicity measure for violable phonological constraints based on the minimum message length method. This measure captures the intuitive desiderata of conciseness, accuracy and precision. A family of constraints can be specified by parameterising a specific constraint, and so forming a template. The combination of this measure with a search algorithm is a powerful learning method for finding the best constraint matching a template and fitting a corpus. This method may be applied iteratively, using the same template, to learn a number of different constraints. Five applications of an implementation show some of the successes of this learning method: from learning consonant cluster constraints to vowel harmony.

Logical approaches to linguistic description, purfieularly those which employ feature structures, have generally treated phonology as though it was the same as orthography. This approach breaks down for languages where the phonological shape of a morpheme can be heavily dependent on the phonological shape of another, as is the ease in Arabic. In this paper we show how .the tense logical approach investigated by Blackburn (1989) can be used to encode hierarchical and temporal phonological information of the kind explored by Bird (1990). Then we show how some Arabic morphemes may be represented and combined.

this paper I will claim that mainstream generarive phonology is drifting away from its procedural roots, and in particular that the role of constraints (parochial and universal) on the well-formedness of phonological representations is becoming more and more crucial. The recognition that constraint-based analyses have explanatory benefits is, however, accompanied by a lack of understanding of how such constraints are to be incorporated into the standard derivational models of phonology of how constraints and rewrite rules interact. The current solutions to this ;Interaction Problem' allow constraints to operate both as filters and as the triggers of repair-strategies, which introduces the new problem of how to predict the appropriate behaviour of the constraints. My solution is to adopt a fully constraint-based, non-derivational approach to phonology, namely DECLAgATIVE PHONOLOGY Declarative phonology provides the optimal solution to the Interaction Problem for it solves it at source. The fundamental architecture of a declarative grammar offers a simple solution to the operation of constraints, reinterpreting repair-strategies as conditional constraints and replacing rule-blocking with standard defaults. It is also the logical conclusion of the trend away from the procedural roots of generarive phonology