Linguistic and semantic representation of the Thompson's motif-index of folk-literature

Abstract

We present on-going work on the linguistic and semantic processing of the labels of the Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, which has been proposed by Stith Thompson for the classification of narrative elements in folk-literature. We automatically extracted the labels of an on-line version of the Index, and wrote specialised grammars for providing for a multi-layer linguistic annotation of them. We are currently working on enriching the linguistically annotated labels with semantic classes and relations, allowing for a better access to the content of the Index. With this resource, we expect to be able to semi-automatically annotate digitised literary works at the sub-document level by means of automatically comparing the annotated Index with the results of text processing tools applied to those works, and so contribute to a better inter-textual interlinking and understanding of related works in the folk-literature, offering a new way of semantically accessing digital libraries. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.