Serialising the ISO SynAF Syntactic Object Model

TL;DR

This paper presents an XML serialization format for the ISO SynAF syntactic object model, supporting various syntactic phenomena and integrating with other standards, demonstrated through a German Treebank case study.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive XML format for SynAF that supports diverse syntactic structures and interfaces with existing standards, enhancing interoperability.

Findings

Successfully serialized complex syntactic phenomena

Demonstrated integration with MAF and ISOCat standards

Applied to German Treebank with positive results

Abstract

This paper introduces, an XML format developed to serialise the object model defined by the ISO Syntactic Annotation Framework SynAF. Based on widespread best practices we adapt a popular XML format for syntactic annotation, TigerXML, with additional features to support a variety of syntactic phenomena including constituent and dependency structures, binding, and different node types such as compounds or empty elements. We also define interfaces to other formats and standards including the Morpho-syntactic Annotation Framework MAF and the ISOCat Data Category Registry. Finally a case study of the German Treebank TueBa-D/Z is presented, showcasing the handling of constituent structures, topological fields and coreference annotation in tandem.