An API for Discourse-level Access to XML-encoded Corpora
Christoph Emanuel Müller, Michael Strube · 2002
We describe a simple and efficient Java object model and application programming interface (API) for (possibly multi-modal) annotated natural language corpora.Corpora are represented as elements like Sentences, Turns, Utterances, Words, Gestures and Markables.The API allows linguists to access corpora in terms of these discourse-level elements, i.e. at a conceptual level they are familiar with, with the flexibility offered by a general purpose programming language.It is also a contribution to corpus standardization efforts because it is based on a straightforward and easily extensible data model which can serve as a target for conversion of different corpus formats.