The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.0295  Thursday, 31 January 2002

From:           Gabriel Egan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Wednesday, 30 Jan 2002 09:58:16 -0000
Subject: 13.0233 Re: SHAXICON Meets SHAXICAN
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.0233 Re: SHAXICON Meets SHAXICAN

Andy White writes,

> XML has the advantage of giving the editor/encoder freedom to ascribe
> specific attributes (read:  usage) to a given piece of text, which might
> be a great help in clarifying questions like those raised by Foster.

XML could be used to define the tags that are employed to incorporate in
an e-text the information about which part of speech each word belongs
to. So could SGML and so could any arbitrary tagging system. The hard
bit is having a Shakespearian linguist make the decisions about which
part of speech each word belongs to, not in the storing of the
decisions. The advantage of XML over SGML as a language for defining
tags is its greater simplicity when defining the relationship between
tags (such as the statement that, to be "grammatical" the entity
"sentence" must contain the entity "main verb"). Once in XML (that is,
once one has defined the tagset and the relationships between the tags),
it would be easy to ask of the data such tricky questions as "which
female characters speak ungrammatical sentences?"

Gabriel Egan

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