Niladri Sekhar Dash - Language Corpora Annotation and Processing

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During the last few years, innovative techniques, strategies, and methods are introduced to annotate and process natural language texts. This has been possible due to the widespread application of texts for various academic and commercial purposes. The value of texts is multiplied if texts are normalized, annotated, and processed properly. Such texts are utilized for the development of various language-related systems and applications. These are indirect incentives for scholars engaged in designing new and innovative techniques for text annotation and processing. Some of the text annotation and processing techniques are discussed in this book. It gives more attention to text annotation as text processing issues are addressed more widely in earlier literature.

People working in various domains of machine learning, artificial intelligence, information technology, language technology, and linguistics realize that they need to devise new methods and techniques to make texts more user- and system-friendly. Texts should be easily accessible so that one can utilize data and information from texts in research and development activities. This has been another factor behind the development of innovative ways of text annotation and processing. The application of innovative techniques on texts generates new kinds of results which have an impact on looking at a language from a new perspective as well as addressing various language-related needs.

New text annotation techniques open new ways of looking at language. New annotation processes are applied to texts to make text data suitable for new applications. It generates new perspectives toward a natural language and its properties. In essence, annotation contributes to looking at a language beyond the traditional frame of analysis and description. The introduction of new text processing techniques, on the other hand, makes us more powerful in gathering offbeat information from texts, furnishing rare and irregular evidence, and modifying existing theories and models based on newly found examples and information. Moreover, analysis of annotated texts produces results to mark limitations and deficiencies of existing theories and intuitions about a natural language and its properties.

A language-based application requires special tools, systems, and techniques to interact with raw and processed texts. The application strength of a tool increases when it works on annotated and processed texts. Proficiency and precision of a system also increase when it is able to access data and information of an annotated text. Keeping these advantages in mind, we discuss some of the conventional and some non-conventional text annotation techniques in this book. We propose to apply these annotation techniques for language-specific research and applications. We have noted that text annotation techniques play a crucial role in devising new methods for language study, developing new skills for language analysis, and identifying new domains for language use. New text annotation techniques also help to collect new evidence from texts, process texts for new usages, and apply language data for new purposes. We collect information from annotated texts to explain non-canonical linguistic phenomenon convincingly, rather than reshaping language data to support the existing theories.

The majority of text annotation tools and systems that are available at present are useful for advanced and resource-rich languages. Scopes of application of these tools and systems in less-advanced and resource-poor languages are quite low. The majority of world languages fall under resource-poor languages. In this context, the present book could have tried to demonstrate how tools and techniques developed for advanced languages could also work elegantly for less-advanced and resource-poor languages. Perhaps, this would have been widely appreciated by the scholars of resource-rich languages. The goal of this book is, however, not fixed on it. It does not desire to show how annotation and processing techniques used in advanced languages are working fine for the less-advanced languages. Rather, it shows that less-advanced languages require similar tools and systems which are characteristically different and which can address language-specific requirements of the less-resourced languages. Since this book focuses on a specific group of languages, the prospective readers are likely to be specialized. This book, however, can find a home in university and research libraries as well as become a text-cum-reference book for corpus linguists in universities and colleges. The importance of this book may be realized when we understand that it discusses some of the crucial issues and aspects of text annotation keeping in view the requirements of less-advanced and resource-poor languages of the world.

I humbly thank my seniors, peers, and juniors who have helped me in different capacities to represent my ideas, concepts, and information in this book. I also thank those scholars who have given me insights and information to shape up new ideas and concepts presented here. I thank those unknown reviewers who have suggested changes and modifications in the manuscript for improvement of content and quality of the volume. I sincerely appreciate their constructive comments. Their suggestions have helped me to revise and upgrade the present book to a large extent.