<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W99-0301">
  <Title>II I References</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="7" end_page="7" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This proliferation of formats and approaches can be viewed as a sign of intellectual ferment. The fact that so many people have devoted so much energy to fielding new entries into this bazaar of data formats indicates how important the computational study of communicative interaction has become. However, for many researchers, this multiplicity of approaches  has produced headaches and confusion, rather than productive scientific advances. We need a way to integrate these approaches without imposing some form of premature closure that would crush experimentation and innovation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Both here, and in associated work (Bird and Liberman, 1999), we have endeavored to show how all current annotation formats involve the basic actions of associating labels with stretches of recorded signal data, and attributing logical sequence, hierarchy and coindexing to such labels. We have grounded this assertion by defining annotation graphs and by showing how a disparate range of annotation formats can be mapped into AGs. This work provides a central piece of the algebraic foundation for inter-translatable formats and inter-operating tools. The intention is not to replace the formats and tools that have been accepted by any existing community of practice, but rather to make the descriptive and analytical practices, the formats, data and tools universally accessible. This means that annotation content for diverse domains and theoretical models can be created and maintained using tools that are the most suitable or familiar to the community in question. It also means that we can get started on integrating annotations, corpora and research findings right away, without having to wait until final agreement on all possible tags and attributes has been achieved.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> There are many existing approaches to discourse annotation, and many options for future approaches. Our explorations presuppose a particular set of goals: (i) generality, specificity, simplicity; (ii) searchability and browsability; and (iii) malnfalnability and durability. These are discussed in full in (Bird and Liberman, 1999, SS6). By identifying a common conceptual core to all annotation structures, we hope to provide a foundation for a wide-ranging integration of tools, formats and corpora. One might, by analogy to translation systems, describe AGs as an interlingua which permits free exchange of annotation data between n systems once n interfaces have been written, rather than n 2 interfaces.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Although we have been primarily concerned with the structure rather than the content of annotations, the approach opens the way to meaningful evaluation of content and comparison of contentful differences between annotations, since it is possible to do all manner of quasi-correlational analyses of parallel annotations. A tool for converting a given format into the AG framework only needs to be written once. Once this has been done, it becomes a straightforward task to pose complex queries over multiple corpora. Whereas if one were to start with annotations in several distinct file formats, it would be a major programming chore to ask even a simple question.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>