Morphological Annotation

Morphological Annotation allows splitting a word/token into morphemes, morphemes itself may be nested. It is embedded within a layer morphology which can be embedded within word/tokens.

Specification

Annotation Category:  

Subtoken Annotation

Declaration:

<morphological-annotation set="..."> (note: ``set`` is optional for this annotation type)

Version History:  

Heavily revised since v0.9

Element:

<morpheme>

API Class:

Morpheme

Required Attributes:   Optional Attributes:  

• xml:id – The ID of the element; this has to be a unique in the entire document or collection of documents (corpus). All identifiers in FoLiA are of the XML NCName datatype, which roughly means it is a unique string that has to start with a letter (not a number or symbol), may contain numers, but may never contain colons or spaces. FoLiA does not define any naming convention for IDs.
• set – The set of the element, ideally a URI linking to a set definition (see Set Definitions (Vocabulary)) or otherwise a uniquely identifying string. The set must be referred to also in the Annotation Declarations for this annotation type.
• class – The class of the annotation, i.e. the annotation tag in the vocabulary defined by set.
• processor – This refers to the ID of a processor in the Provenance Data. The processor in turn defines exactly who or what was the annotator of the annotation.
• annotator – This is an older alternative to the processor attribute, without support for full provenance. The annotator attribute simply refers to the name o ID of the system or human annotator that made the annotation.
• annotatortype – This is an older alternative to the processor attribute, without support for full provenance. It is used together with annotator and specific the type of the annotator, either manual for human annotators or auto for automated systems.
• confidence – A floating point value between zero and one; expresses the confidence the annotator places in his annotation.
• datetime – The date and time when this annotation was recorded, the format is YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss (note the literal T in the middle to separate date from time), as per the XSD Datetime data type.
• n – A number in a sequence, corresponding to a number in the original document, for example chapter numbers, section numbers, list item numbers. This this not have to be an actual number but other sequence identifiers are also possible (think alphanumeric characters or roman numerals).
• src – Points to a file or full URL of a sound or video file. This attribute is inheritable.
• begintime – A timestamp in HH:MM:SS.MMM format, indicating the begin time of the speech. If a sound clip is specified (src); the timestamp refers to a location in the soundclip.
• endtime – A timestamp in HH:MM:SS.MMM format, indicating the end time of the speech. If a sound clip is specified (src); the timestamp refers to a location in the soundclip.
• speaker – A string identifying the speaker. This attribute is inheritable. Multiple speakers are not allowed, simply do not specify a speaker on a certain level if you are unable to link the speech to a specific (single) speaker.

Accepted Data:

<alt> (Alternative Annotation), <altlayers> (Alternative Annotation), <comment> (Comment Annotation), <correction> (Correction Annotation), <desc> (Description Annotation), <metric> (Metric Annotation), <morpheme> (Morphological Annotation), <part> (Part Annotation), <ph> (Phonetic Annotation/Content), <relation> (Relation Annotation), <str> (String Annotation), <t> (Text Annotation)

Valid Context:

<morpheme> (Morphological Annotation), <morphology> (Morphological Annotation)

Feature subsets (extra attributes):  

• function

Explanation

Tokens can be further segmented into morphemes, a form of structure annotation. Morphemes behave much like <w> elements (tokens). Moreover, morphemes can be referred to from within in span annotation using <wref>, allowing spans to be defined not only over whole words/tokens but also parts thereof. The element for morphemes is <morpheme>, and can only occur within <w> elements. Recall that <t> elements can contain references to higher-level <t> elements. In such cases, the offset attribute is used to designate the offset index in the word’s associated text element (<t>)` (zero being right at the start of the text). Morphemes may do this.

Furthermore, a morpheme may take a class in a user-defined set, referring to its type.

Morphemes are grouped in a morphology layer, in turn embedded in a word, this is analogous to Span Annotation.

Consider the following example:

<w xml:id="example.p.4.s.2.w.4">
    <t>leest</t>
    <lemma class="lezen" />
    <morphology>
        <morpheme class="stem" function="lexical">
            <t offset="0">lees</t>
        </morpheme>
        <morpheme class="suffix" function="inflexional">
            <t offset="4">t</t>
        </morpheme>
    </morphology>
</w>

There is a predefined feature subset (see Features) which you can use with morphemes, it is called function and denotes the function of the morpheme, the class it takes is defined by the particular set used.

Morphemes allow the same kinds of inline annotation just as words do. We can for instance bind lemma annotation to the morpheme representing the word’s stem rather than only to the entire word:

<w xml:id="example.p.4.s.2.w.4">
    <t>leest</t>
    <lemma class="lezen" />
    <morphology>
        <morpheme xml:id="example.p.4.s.2.w.4.m.1" class="stem"
         function="lexical">
            <lemma class="lezen" />
            <t offset="0">lees</t>
        </morpheme>
        <morpheme xml:id="example.p.4.s.2.w.4.m.2" class="suffix"
         function="inflexional">
            <t offset="4">t</t>
        </morpheme>
    </morphology>
</w>

Similarly, consider the Spanish word or phrase “Dámelo” (give it to me), written as one entity. If this has not been split during tokenisation, but left as a single token, you can annotate its morphemes, as all morphemes allow token annotation to be placed within their scope:

<w xml:id="example.p.1.s.1.w.1">
    <t>dámelo</t>
    <morphology>
        <morpheme class="stem">
            <t offset="0">dá</t>
            <lemma class="dar" />
            <pos class="v" />
        </morpheme>
        <morpheme class="suffix">
            <t offset="2">me</t>
            <lemma class="me" />
            <pos class="pron" />
        </morpheme>
        <morpheme class="suffix">
            <t offset="4">lo</t>
            <lemma class="lo" />
            <pos class="pron" />
        </morpheme>
    </morphology>
</w>

Unlike words, but similar to Syntactic Annotation, morphemes may also be nested, as they can be expressed on multiple levels:

<w xml:id="example.p.1.s.1.w.1">
    <t>comfortable</t>
    <morphology>
        <morpheme class="base">
            <t offset="0">comfort</t>
            <morpheme class="prefix">
                <t offset="0">com</t>
            </morpheme>
            <morpheme class="morph">
                <t offset="3">fort</t>
            </morpheme>
        </morpheme>
        <morpheme class="suffix">
            <t offset="7">able</t>
        </morpheme>
    </morphology>
</w>

The next example will illustrate how morphemes can be referred to in span annotation. Here we have a morpheme, and not the entire word, which forms a named entity:

<w xml:id="example.p.4.s.2.w.4">
    <t>CDA-voorzitter</t>
    <morphemes>
        <morpheme xml:id="example.p.4.s.2.w.1.m.1">
            <t offset="0">CDA</t>
        </morpheme>
    </morphemes>
    <entities>
        <entity xml:id="entity.1" class="organisation">
            <wref id="example.p.4.s.2.w.1.m.1" t="CDA" />
        </entity>
    </entities>
</w>

The same approach can be followed for other kinds of span annotation. Note that the span annotation layer (<entities> in the example) may be embedded on various levels. Most commonly on sentence level, but also on word level, paragraph level or the global text level.