Publication
Proppian Content Descriptors in an Integrated Annotation Schema for Fairy Tales
Thierry Declerck; Antonia Scheidel; Piroska Lendvai
In: Caroline Sporleder; Antal van den Bosch; Kalliopi Zervanou. Language Technology for Cultural Heritage. Selected Papers from the LaTeCH Workshop Series. Pages 155-169, Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, ISBN 978-3-642-20226-1, Springer, Heidelberg, 2011.
Abstract
This chapter describes the actual state of development of a markup scheme
that combines narrative and linguistic information for the fine-grained annotation of
folktales. The scheme builds on and extends an existing mark-up language called
PftML (Proppian fairy tale Markup Language) and combines this with textual and
linguistic annotation standards as proposed by TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and
ISO TC37/SC4 on language resources management. We call our scheme therefore
APftML (Augmented Proppian fairy tale Markup Language). One aim of this
schema is to offer support for combined Natural Language Technology and Digital
Humanities research, exemplified in the fairy tale domain. A final goal is to
semi-automatically annotate fairy tales, in particular to locate and mark up fairy tale
characters and the actions they are involved in, which can be subsequently queried
in a corpus by both linguists and specialists in the field. The characters and actions
are defined in Propp’s structural analysis to folk tales, which we aim to implement
in a fully fledged way, contrary to existing resources. We argue that the approach
devises a means for linguistic processing of folk tale texts in order to support their
automated semantic annotation in terms of narrative units and functions.