Non-hierarchical Structures: How to Model and Index Overlaps?

Overlap is a common phenomenon seen when structural components of a digital object are neither disjoint nor nested inside each other. Overlapping components resist reduction to a structural hierarchy, and tree-based indexing and query processing techniques cannot be used for them. Our solution to this data modeling problem is TGSA (Tree-like Graph for Structural Annotations), a novel extension of the XML data model for non-hierarchical structures. We introduce an algorithm for constructing TGSA from annotated documents; the algorithm can efficiently process non-hierarchical structures and is associated with formal proofs, ensuring that transformation of the document to the data model is valid. To enable high performance query analysis in large data repositories, we further introduce an extension of XML pre-post indexing for non-hierarchical structures, which can process both reachability and overlapping relationships.Comment: The paper has been accepted at the Balisage 2014 conferenc

Multiple hierarchies : new aspects of an old solution

In this paper, we present the Multiple Annotation approach, which solves two problems: the problem of annotating overlapping structures, and the problem that occurs when documents should be annotated according to different, possibly heterogeneous tag sets. This approach has many advantages: it is based on XML, the modeling of alternative annotations is possible, each level can be viewed separately, and new levels can be added at any time. The files can be regarded as an interrelated unit, with the text serving as the implicit link. Two representations of the information contained in the multiple files (one in Prolog and one in XML) are described. These representations serve as a base for several applications

Representations of sources and data: working with exceptions to hierarchy in historical documents

No abstract available

Searching Multi-Hierarchical XML Documents: the Case of Fragmentation

To properly encode properties of textual documents using XML, multiple markup hierarchies must be used, often leading to conflicting markup in encodings. Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines [1] recognize this problem and suggest a number of ways to incorporate multiple hierarchies in a single well-formed XML document. In this paper, we present a framework for processing XPath queries over multi-hierarchical XML documents represented using fragmentation, one of the TEI-suggested techniques. We define the semantics of XPath over DOM trees of fragmented XML, extend the path expression language to cover overlap in markup, and describe FragXPath, our implementation of the proposed XPath semantics over fragmented markup

Unity in diversity : integrating differing linguistic data in TUSNELDA

This paper describes the creation and preparation of TUSNELDA, a collection of corpus data built for linguistic research. This collection contains a number of linguistically annotated corpora which differ in various aspects such as language, text sorts / data types, encoded annotation levels, and linguistic theories underlying the annotation. The paper focuses on this variation on the one hand and the way how these heterogeneous data are integrated into one resource on the other hand

On the Lossless Transformation of Single-File, Multi-Layer Annotations into Multi-Rooted Trees

The Generalised Architecture for Sustainability (GENAU) provides a framework for the transformation of single-file, multi-layer annotations into multi-rooted trees. By employing constraints expressed in XCONCUR-CL, this procedure can be performed lossless, i.e., without losing information, especially with regard to the nesting of elements that belong to multiple annotation layers. This article describes how different types of linguistic corpora can be transformed using specialised tools, and how constraint rules can be applied to the resulting multi-rooted trees to add an additional level of validation

On Horizontal and Vertical Separation in Hierarchical Text Classification

Hierarchy is a common and effective way of organizing data and representing their relationships at different levels of abstraction. However, hierarchical data dependencies cause difficulties in the estimation of "separable" models that can distinguish between the entities in the hierarchy. Extracting separable models of hierarchical entities requires us to take their relative position into account and to consider the different types of dependencies in the hierarchy. In this paper, we present an investigation of the effect of separability in text-based entity classification and argue that in hierarchical classification, a separation property should be established between entities not only in the same layer, but also in different layers. Our main findings are the followings. First, we analyse the importance of separability on the data representation in the task of classification and based on that, we introduce a "Strong Separation Principle" for optimizing expected effectiveness of classifiers decision based on separation property. Second, we present Hierarchical Significant Words Language Models (HSWLM) which capture all, and only, the essential features of hierarchical entities according to their relative position in the hierarchy resulting in horizontally and vertically separable models. Third, we validate our claims on real-world data and demonstrate that how HSWLM improves the accuracy of classification and how it provides transferable models over time. Although discussions in this paper focus on the classification problem, the models are applicable to any information access tasks on data that has, or can be mapped to, a hierarchical structure.Comment: Full paper (10 pages) accepted for publication in proceedings of ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR'16

MULTIHIERARCHICAL DOCUMENTS AND FINE-GRAINED ACCESS CONTROL

This work presents new models and algorithms for creating, modifying, and controlling access to complex text. The digitization of texts opens new opportunities for preservation, access, and analysis, but at the same time raises questions regarding how to represent and collaboratively edit such texts. Two issues of particular interest are modelling the relationships of markup (annotations) in complex texts, and controlling the creation and modification of those texts. This work addresses and connects these issues, with emphasis on data modelling, algorithms, and computational complexity; and contributes new results in these areas of research. Although hierarchical models of text and markup are common, complex texts often exhibit layers of overlapping structure that are best described by multihierarchical markup. We develop a new model of multihierarchical markup, the globally ordered GODDAG, that combines features of both graph- and range-based models of markup, allowing documents to be unambiguously serialized. We describe extensions to the XPath query language to support globally ordered GODDAGs, provide semantics for a set of update operations on this structure, and provide algorithms for converting between two different representations of the globally ordered GODDAG. Managing the collaborative editing of documents can require restricting the types of changes different editors may make, while not altogether restricting their access to the document. Fine-grained access control allows precisely these kinds of restrictions on the operations that a user is or is not permitted to perform on a document. We describe a rule-based model of fine-grained access control for updates of hierarchical documents, and in this context analyze the document generation problem: determining whether a document could have been created without violating a particular access control policy. We show that this problem is undecidable in the general case and provide computational complexity bounds for a number of restricted variants of the problem. Finally, we extend our fine-grained access control model from hierarchical to multihierarchical documents. We provide semantics for fine-grained access control policies that control splice-in, splice-out, and rename operations on globally ordered GODDAGs, and show that the multihierarchical version of the document generation problem remains undecidable

REPRESENTATION OF MULTI-STRUCTURED Documents with OWL. Applications to Philology.

Multi-Structured documents (denoted MSDs) are documents whose structure is composed of a set of concurrent hierarchical structures. Many distinct structures may be defined simultaneously for the same original document (logical structure, physical structure). Each hierarchy analyses the text within the document by a different point of view, which depends on different use of that text. These structures may overlap over the document contents. XML has become the most used language for encoding electronic documents. XML documents are tree based; and since there are overlapping between different structures, the hierarchy of a tree allows encoding a document depending on one structure. Some applications need to consider more than one hierarchy over the same text, which corresponds to different analysis for different uses of that document. If several different structures should be represented, the solution that manages several different versions for same information is not only ineffective and expensive in time and resources, but does not allow, for example, a search for information relating to two different structures for the same document. One of the distinguished solutions that addressed this problematic, is a generic model called Multi- Structure Document Model (MSDM), which is independent of any formalism of encoding. However MSDM is encoded by formalism called MultiX that uses XML syntax. MultiX could serialize the MSDM model into XML syntax and expresses the different structures and their correspondences in a single xml file. However it still has some complexity due to its respect to XML tree model. In this paper, we will present how to encode MSDs depending on MSDM but by means of non-tree based data model (graph based). We will use Ontology Web Language (OWL) to represent the metadata that corresponds to XML schema in MultiX. To illustrate our work, we choose, as running example, an application of philology (science dedicated to the study of text history).The example is a fragment of an old manuscript written in Occitan language. Keywords: Multi-Structured documents, XML, MSDM, MultiX, OWL, encoding manuscripts