Proppian Content Descriptors in an Integrated Annotation Schema for Fairy Tales

Abstract

This chapter describes the actual state of development of a markup schemethat combines narrative and linguistic information for the fine-grained annotation offolktales. The scheme builds on and extends an existing mark-up language calledPftML (Proppian fairy tale Markup Language) and combines this with textual andlinguistic annotation standards as proposed by TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) andISO TC37/SC4 on language resources management. We call our scheme thereforeAPftML (Augmented Proppian fairy tale Markup Language). One aim of thisschema is to offer support for combined Natural Language Technology and DigitalHumanities research, exemplified in the fairy tale domain. A final goal is tosemi-automatically annotate fairy tales, in particular to locate and mark up fairy talecharacters and the actions they are involved in, which can be subsequently queriedin a corpus by both linguists and specialists in the field. The characters and actionsare defined in Propp's structural analysis to folk tales, which we aim to implementin a fully fledged way, contrary to existing resources. We argue that the approachdevises a means for linguistic processing of folk tale texts in order to support theirautomated semantic annotation in terms of narrative units and functions.