This paper provides an overview of the xDD/LAPPS Grid framework and provides results of evaluating the AskMe retrievalengine using the BEIR benchmark datasets. Our primary goal is to determine a solid baseline of performance to guide furtherdevelopment of our retrieval capabilities. Beyond this, we aim to dig deeper to determine when and why certain approachesperform well (or badly) on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, an issue that has to date received relatively little attention.

We describe a novel super-infrastructure for biomedical text mining which incorporates an end-to-end pipeline for the collection, annotation, storage, retrieval and analysis of biomedical and life sciences literature, combining NLP and corpus linguistics methods. The infrastructure permits extreme-scale research on the open access PubMed Central archive. It combines an updatable Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger (GOST) for entity identification and semantic markup in the literature, with a NLP pipeline scheduler (Buster) to collect and process the corpus, and a bespoke columnar corpus database (LexiDB) for indexing. The corpus database is distributed to permit fast indexing, and provides a simple web front-end with corpus linguistics methods for sub-corpus comparison and retrieval. GOST is also connected as a service in the Language Application (LAPPS) Grid, in which context it is interoperable with other NLP tools and data in the Grid and can be combined with them in more complex workflows. In a literature based discovery setting, we have created an annotated corpus of 9,776 papers with 5,481,543 words.

Promoting interoperrable computational linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) application platforms and interchange-able data formats have contributed improving discoverabilty and accessbility of the openly available NLP software. In this paper, wediscuss the enhanced data visualization capabilities that are also enabled by inter-operating NLP pipelines and interchange formats. For adding openly available visualization tools and graphical annotation tools to the Language Applications Grid (LAPPS Grid) andComputational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (CLAMS) toolboxes, we have developed interchange formats that cancarry annotations and metadata for text and audiovisual source data. We descibe those data formats and present case studies where wesuccessfully adopt open-source visualization tools and combine them with CL tools.

This paper describes the Linguistic Annotation Framework under development within ISO TC37 SC4 WG1. The Linguistic Annotation Framework is intended to serve as a basis for harmonizing existing language resources as well as developing new ones.

It is widely recognized that the proliferation of annotation schemes runs counter to the need to re-use language resources, and that standards for linguistic annotation are becoming increasingly mandatory. To answer this need, we have developed a representation framework comprised of an abstract model for a variety of different annotation types (e.g., morpho-syntactic tagging, syntactic annotation, co-reference annotation, etc.), which can be instantiated in different ways depending on the annotator s approach and goals. In this paper we provide an overview of our representation framework and demonstrate its applicability to syntactic annotation. We show how the framework can contribute to comparative evaluation and merging of parser output and diverse syntactic annotation schemes.

In this paper, we outline a theory of referential accessibility called Veins Theory (VT). We show how VT addresses the problem of "left satellites", currently a problem for stack-based models, and show that VT can be used to significantly reduce the search space for antecedents. We also show that VT provides a better model for determining domains of referential accessibility, and discuss how VT can be used to address various issues of structural ambiguity.

The Text Encoding Initiative is an international collaboration aimed at producing a common encoding scheme for complex texts. The diversity of the texts used by members of the communities served by the project led to a large specification, but the specification is structured to facilitate understanding and use. The requirement for generality is sometimes in tension with the requirement to handle specialized text types. The texts that are encoded often can be viewed or interpreted in several different ways. While many electronic documents can be encoded in very simple ways, some documents and some users will tax the limits of any fixed scheme, so a flexible extensible encoding is required to support research and to facilitate the reuse of texts. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.