OntoLingAnnot’s Ontologies: Facilitating Interoperable Linguistic Annotations (Up to the Pragmatic Level)

Abstract

This paper presents the OntoLingAnnot annotation framework, already developed for the annotation of morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse phenomena, and its extension to cover the annotation of pragmatic phenomena. This extension was considered the ideal test bed for the interoperability of the linguistic annotations performed by means of the platform, since (i) pragmatics itself deals with a real mix of different linguistic topics, such as speech acts, pragmatic coherence relations, deixis, presuppositions and implicatures; and (ii) it clearly interacts with the rest of levels, since (potentially) every linguistic unit at any level can have a pragmatic projection. In particular, it introduces the different pragmatic units that can be used to annotate texts and dialogues using the framework. These pragmatic units are included in the set of ontologies associated to OntoLingAnnot, whose design requirements and development process are also described here. Besides, this paper shows as well the main principles and properties of the OntoLingAnnot annotation framework that help its different annotations interoperate.