Community Standards for Linguistically-Annotated Resources

This chapter provides a broad overview of the state-of-the-art in standards development for language resources, beginning with a brief historical overview to serve as context. It describes in some detail several current, major efforts that define the standardization landscape for language resources today, with the aim of outlining their differences and commonalities and, more generally, identifying the progress that has been made to date as well as the obstacles to definitive standardization. In addition to describing standards that are most applicable to linguistic annotation of text, we include a section that overviews considerations and alternatives for spoken data. We also overview a widely-used and influential de facto standard and consider its role in standards development. Finally, we provide an assessment of the standards landscape and the options available to current and future creators of linguistically-annotated resources.