SALS-SIG Research Seminar
TEI Encoding and Syntactic Tagging of an Old French text
| Speaker: | Dominique Estival |
| | University of Melbourne |
| Date: | Tuesday 10th November 1998 |
| Time: | 11:30 - 12:30 |
| Place: | Seminar room 357, Building E6A, Macquarie University |
Abstract:
In this talk I will report on one of the concrete outcomes of a research
project
undertaken at the University of Melbourne, on the Computational
Modelling of Syntactic Change. In this part of the project, we are
collecting and encoding historical texts and tagging them for syntactic
analysis. We have so far produced a TEI-conformant version of an Old
French text,
La Vie de Saint Louis written by Jehan de
Joinville around 1305, and we are in the process of adding syntactic tags
to this text. Those syntactic tags are derived from the Penn-Helsinki
coding scheme, which had been devised for the syntactic encoding of Middle
English texts, and they have been translated into TEI.
Thus this paper addresses two issues: the development of a TEI encoding
for the text, and the adaptation of the Penn-Helsinki syntactic coding
scheme. While the first part of this work raises issues of a textual nature
independently of the language of the text, and proposes concrete immediate
solutions, the second part of this work points to a more general extension
of the PH tagset to other types of texts and to other languages.
In the long run, the whole project should lead to a better understanding of
two universal characteristics of language, language variation and language
change. I will argue that an understanding of the limits and types of
variation
in language is necessary to deal adequately with actual language, and that
ultimately the integration of language variability in NLP modelling should
result in models and applications that are closer to the behavior of humans in
real language situations.
Enquiries:
sals@mri.mq.edu.au
| Last modified: November, 1998 |
