Analysis and Interpretation Committee
Minutes of the meeting held at Oxford University Press,
21 September 1989
Lou Burnard
10 October 1989
Document Number: TEI AI M1
Present: Robert Amsler (RA); Steve Anderson (SA); Bran Boguraev (BB);
Lou Burnard (LB); Nicoletta Calzolari (NC); Nancy Ide (NI); Terry
Langendoen (TL), chair; Winfried Lenders (WL); Nelleke Oostdijk (NO);
Bill Poser (BP); Beatrice Santorini (BS), replacing Mitch Marcus; Gary
Simons (GS); Michael Sperberg-McQueen (MSM); Donald Walker (DW); Antonio
Zampolli (AZ)
Final 10 Oct 89
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INTRODUCTORY BUSINESS
TL welcomed members of the committee and drew their attention to the
agenda previously circulated.
Expenses
Committee members are reminded to send all receipts for travel to MSM at
UIC. A maximum per diem of $20 is payable without receipts; with
receipts up to 50% of estimated travel costs would be reimbursed. (The
ceilings are thus $650 for North Americans and 315 ECU for Europeans at
this meeting. -Ed.) North Americans should send originals and would be
reimbursed (up to 50%) in US dollars; Europeans may send copies and
would be reimbursed in ECUs.
Timetable
Three meetings were scheduled for the current funding cycle. A draft
of the committee's guidelines was due by March 1990. The next meeting
could conveniently (except for some Europeans) be held at the time of
the LSA and MLA meetings in Washington during (Dec. 28-30). The final
meeting could be held, in Tucson, at the end of February. MSM gave an
overview of the TEI timetable; funding for the second cycle had already
been requested of NEH and a decision would be made by May 1990.
Committee Brief
TL stressed that the committee's task in the current phase was more
to decide what to mark up than exactly how to do it. He had had the
opportunity of discussing SGML with the chair of the Metalanguage Com-
mittee (David Barnard) and saw no technical reason why it should not
support the committee's requirements, however imperspicuously. The com-
mittee's work would undoubtedly take SGML into corners it had not as yet
visited, but the Metalanguage Committee would have the job of identify-
ing and then supporting any extensions to the standard which might be
required. There was no requirement that the committee adopt SGML for its
own internal working: its job was to produce tagsets. He likened the
committee's role to that of the body which defined IPA: it had to define
a universal language for text structure, capable of supporting any one
of a number of possibly inconsistent or mutually exclusive theoretical
frameworks. No unification of theories was expected of it, nor would it
be responsible for implementing any part of its proposals. As with IPA
again, the object was to define an interchange format rather than an
application-specific one.
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GENERAL DISCUSSION
RA drew a parallel between the committee's task and that of defining
purely typographic markup. It should focus on tagsets rather than on
theoretical discussions. BP asked whether linguistic rules should not be
tagged as such, since they would necessarily form a part of the content
of some texts to be tagged. TL said that a full analysis of formulae as
such should be deferred to the second cycle. The goal should be to tag
such things adequately to ensure their correct representation, indepen-
dent of any particular formatter. If two theories are disjoint with
respect to a particular feature (traces for example), it should be pos-
sible but not obligatory to supply it. BP stressed the importance of
making provision for less orthodox theories using entirely different
representations. TL said subcommittees should aim to be catholic, iden-
tifying as many theories as possible. NC asked whether when considering
existing markup schemes, e.g. TOSCA or LOB, it would be necessary to
identify conversion rules, grouping tags according to their function. TL
said that such mappings were the responsibility of the Metalanguage Com-
mittee. The main focus should be on linguistic issues and alphabetic
texts. BP asked about polylinguistic texts and non-Roman alphabets, for
example Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, or Japanese texts with embedded
________________
Chinese characters. TL replied that the Text representation committee
would address these problems, although the question of syntactic fea-
tures linking parallel structures was within the A&I committee's brief.
MSM said that the question of synchronised structures was a good example
of an area where several committees would need to work, as were cross-
reference and the markup of discontinuous text segments and of segments
with unclear boundaries. He stressed the importance of good communica-
tion between the committee heads and the editors in this respect. TL
stated that linguistic markup should include all of semantics and prag-
matics, and acknowledging the point of view of certain linguists, such
as George Lakoff, that all domain-specifying categories are artificial,
contended that the markup should make it possible to smear all these
distinctions.
WL asked whether the intention was to provide a language-independent
superset of tagsets, citing the MATER standard (ISO 6156) as one which
had found the need to include a German-specific appendix. TL stated that
his personal preference was for a superset. DW pointed out that no par-
ticular tagset would use all available tags and MSM that the Steering
Committee had already decided tagsets should be extensible, and re-
nameable.
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SUBCOMMITTEE WORK
Dictionary Encoding Subcommittee
RA reported on the Dictionary Encoding Standard worked out in collab-
oration with Frank Tompa at Bellcore, and circulated copies of their
joint paper describing it. RA said that the paper needed many more
examples and more descriptive text. He invited comments from the commit-
tee and indicated that he would circulate any comments received on
extensions to it (also see "4. The Amsler/Tompa paper will be given a
number"). RA is chair of the dictionary subcommittee; BB and NC are
members. Two areas of activity were proposed for the subcommittee: one
was to broaden the work to include non-English and multilingual diction-
aries and the other to consider etymology. Frank Abate had volunteered
to investigate the latter. Alain Pierrot was collaborating with NI on a
DTD for Hachette's dictionaries. John Fought and Carol Van Ess-Dykema
were developing a multilingual standard, with language-specific exten-
sions for each language.
AZ asked whether this subcommittee would also deal with machine-
tractable dictionaries, or electronic lexica. RA replied that there was
considerable overlap of interests among the proposed membership. A brief
discussion of the wisdom, or lack of it, of recoding lexica expressed in
LISP in SGML ensued. AZ opined that it was organisationally preferable
for this subcommittee to focus only on printed dictionaries, aiming at a
neutral interchangeable format. Output from other subcommittees (mor-
phology for example) would be useful at a later stage in the project.(1)
Other members proposed for the subcommittee were Susan Warwick
(ISSCO, Geneva), Carol Van Ess-Dykema (NSA), John Fought (U Penn) and
additional representatives from the groups at Bellcore, IBM, Pisa and
IKP (Bonn). Communication between these and commercial publishers was
important.
Phonetics/Phonology Subcommittee
This work of this group, chaired by Bill Poser, would to some extent
overlap with that of the Text Representation committee. It would addi-
tionally address such issues as hesitation, intonation, and overlapping,
and the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, but would need to
prioritize these carefully. AZ reminded the committee of the importance
of supporting the needs of the speech synthesis community in this con-
text. RA asked whether the dictionary encoding should attempt to define
phonemic equivalences in IPA or something else: his view was that they
should not.
After lunch, the following were suggested as possible members for
this subcommittee: Ken Church and Mark Liberman (AT&T); Henry Thompson
(Edinburgh); Jared Bernstein (SRI); Lauri Lamell (MIT); Janet Pierrehum-
bert (Northwestern); Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie-Mellon); Paul Roossin
(IBM); Bob Mercer (IBM); Jan Svartvik (Lund); John McCarthy (U Massachu-
setts).
BP said that the work of the subcommittee should include "gestural
stuff": its task was not to propose a Klatt-style "ARPAbet" but to make
it possible for anyone who wished to use one to define such a code in a
portable way. He asked where the kind of phonemic markup employed should
be specified and whether its semantics should be specified with refer-
ence to e.g. IPA. MSM saw this as another area where this committee's
work overlapped with that of another: the Text Documentation committee
would provide a space into which declarations of this kind could be
placed, but little more. If texts include application specific data (for
example F0 values) it was clearly necessary to provide portable ways of
interpreting them.
Morphology Subcommittee
This subcommittee currently comprises Steve Anderson (chair), Win-
fried Lenders and Gary Simons. It will address such standard issues as
the delimiting and classifying of words, aiming at generic solutions
rather than value lists. SA suggested that many substantive categories
such as dialectal or usage variants are not morphological but lexical
information. The subcommittee should focus be on the representation of
the internal structure of words, recognising however that simply delim-
iting morphemes would be inadequate for discontinuous segments (e.g. in
Arabic) or for the use of such tricks as ablaut in Germanic languages,
or metathesis in Saylish to render aspectual distinctions. SA suggested
that the most promising line was to identify and generalise the rela-
tionships existing between different forms, regarding morphology as the
internal syntax of words.
Members proposed for the subcommittee included: Martin Chodorow
(Hunter C, CUNY); Richard Sproat (AT&T); Kimmo Koskiennemi (Helsinki);
Lauri Karttunen (Xerox PARC); Jorge Hankamer (UC Santa Cruz); Mark Aro-
noff (SUNY Stony Brook); John McCarthy and Lisa Selkirk (U Massachu-
setts); Burghardt Schaeder (Siegen).
There was some discussion of the level of generalisation appropriate
to the subcommittee's work. NC and AZ pointed out that for most people
identifying the lexical item (lemma) appropriate to a surface form was
of far more importance than its internal structure. AZ asked whether
compound words would also be considered. SA replied that these were a
special case of the general rule. TL said it was important to support
different levels of analysis. RA suggested that some redundancy in the
encoding would be a helpful way of supporting this. He also recommended
that as much language-specific information as possible should be identi-
fied and shared amongst members of the subcommittee. BP remarked on the
existence of many large corpora of Amerindian languages exhibiting many
unusual features. RA recommended the use of consultants with expertise
in these areas, mentioning David Nash for Australian Aboriginal languag-
es.
Resuming the earlier discussion, MSM pointed out that the coding
schemes used by existing tagged corpora often blurred lexical, syntactic
and morphological distinctions. He felt that it was enough to identify
places where a value could be recorded without attempting to unravel its
semantics. RA noted that the DEI often specified alternative ways of
encoding a given feature; GS that tags were treated isomorphically with
data in the Brown Corpus. AZ was firmly of the opinion that a well
defined set of values should be identified, for example, for part of
speech, rather than an open ended set. RA remarked that SGML gave us a
better notation than that available to earlier projects which often
needed to attach attribute values to every token because they lacked the
notion of markup distributed throughout a text.
Syntax subcommittee
BS reported on behalf of Mitch Marcus who had been asked to form this
subcommittee, together with herself, NO and Hans Uszkoreit. They felt
that whatever was to be provided should be able to specify both ambigu-
ous and hierarchic syntactic structures, to cope with a variety of re-
analysis phenomena and other syntactic ambiguities. A single word (e.g.
the Japanese causative) might require a bi-clausal analysis. Multiple
simultaneous representations of a string might be needed, for example
"(take advantage [of) John]." TL remarked that David Barnard had stated
that such things could be managed by SGML. SA asked whether it was also
capable of Postal-style arc-pair grammar. On ambiguity, RA highlighted
the need to distinguish the deliberately ambiguous from the merely
vague, contrasting "the duck is ready to eat" with "light house keep-
ing". NO asked whether idiomatic and figurative phrases belonged in
this subcommittee: most present agreed with her that they did not. Idi-
omatic phrases formed a convenient unit, but were not in fact phrases.
They also had multiple class membership. TL mentioned the need to sup-
port inheritance of properties within a hierarchy by placing attributes
as high as possible in the tree: if tense is only marked as a property
of verbs, it becomes difficult to deduce the tense of sentences.
The following people were suggested for this subcommittee: Annie
Zaenen (Xerox PARC); James Pustejovsky (Brandeis); Geoffrey Leech (Lan-
caster); Geoffrey Sampson; Robin Fawcett (Cardiff); Beth Levin (North-
western); Eric Wehrli (UCLA); Gerald Gazdar (Sussex); Don Hindle (AT&T);
Elisabet Engdahl (Edinburgh).
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ACTIONS
1. Subcommittee chairs should co-opt people to their committees and
produce interim reports by 1 November, 1989.
2. Subcommittee chairs were requested to save and precis for distri-
bution all correspondence with potential members. TL offered the
services of his office for assistance with TEI work, particularly
in sending documents out to subcommittee members.
3. All working documents should be sent to TL who would assign num-
bers and post them on the TEI-ANA server.
4. The Amsler/Tompa paper will be given a number shortly, and com-
ments were requested as soon as possible, particularly with
respect to extending its scope to include polylingual and non-
English dictionaries and to discussing the etymology problem.
5. The committee should agree the structure of an overall interim
report. It was agreed to differ discourse analysis to the second
cycle.
6. MSM requested that draft documents be distributed using some form
of descriptive markup to simplify their later reuse. He and LB
are working on a tagset for this purpose, but committee members
should not await its appearance before putting finger to keyboard.
These minutes reflect this (mostly LB's doing, but TL has lent a
hand).
7. Minutes of the meeting to be distributed by the end of September
1989.
8. TL to try to contact Hans Uszkoreit.
9. NI to circulate details of the TEI workshop at the MLA meeting in
Washington in December, so that our next committee meeting can be
definitely scheduled (see "Remaining Meetings").
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REMAINING MEETINGS
The next meeting will be held in Washington, DC in conjunction with
LSA and MLA meetings, either 28 or 29 December, so as not to conflict
with the TEI workshop at MLA.
The final meeting will be held in Tucson, AZ in late February or ear-
ly March, 1990.
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(1) Since the meeting, RA has suggested adding Robert Ingria as co-chair
of the Dictionary subcommittee and extending its mandate to include
the development of recommendations for encoding electronic lexica.
Final 10 Oct 89