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Linguistic corpora have been annotated by means of SGML-based markup languages for almost 20 years. We can, very roughly, differentiate between three distinct evolutionary stages of markup technologies. (1)Originally, single SGML tree-based document instances were deemed sufficient for the representation of linguistic structures. (2) Linguists began to realize that alternatives and extensions to the traditional model are needed. Formalisms such as, for example, NITE were proposed: the NITE Object Model (NOM) consists of multi-rooted trees. (3) We are now on the threshold of the third evolutionary stage: even NITE's very flexible approach is not suited for all linguistic purposes. As some structures, such as these, cannot be modeled by multi-rooted trees, an even more flexible approach is needed in order to provide a generic annotation format that is able to represent genuinely arbitrary linguistic data structures.
Poster des Text+ Partners Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim präsentiert beim Workshop "Wohin damit? Storing and reusing my language data" am 22. Juni 2023 in Mannheim. Das Poster wurde im Kontext der Arbeit des Vereins Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V. verfasst. NFDI wird von der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den 16 Bundesländern finanziert, und das Konsortium Text+ wird gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 460033370. Die Autor:innen bedanken sich für die Förderung sowie Unterstützung. Ein Dank geht außerdem an alle Einrichtungen und Akteur:innen, die sich für den Verein und dessen Ziele engagieren.
Integrated Linguistic Annotation Models and Their Application in the Domain of Antecedent Detection
(2011)
Seamless integration of various, often heterogeneous linguistic resources in terms of their output formats and a combined analysis of the respective annotation layers are crucial tasks for linguistic research. After a decade of concentration on the development of formats to structure single annotations for specific linguistic issues, in the last years a variety of specifications to store multiple annotations over the same primary data has been developed. The paper focuses on the integration of the knowledge resource logical document structure information into a text document to enhance the task of automatic anaphora resolution both for the task of candidate detection and antecedent selection. The paper investigates data structures necessary for knowledge integration and retrieval.
Formalisierung von Kontext und sprachlichem Wissen mit Prioritisierter Circumscription (VM-Memo 55)
(1994)
On the Lossless Transformation of Single-File, Multi-Layer Annotations into Multi-Rooted Trees
(2007)
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.
This paper describes the effort of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS), the central research institution for the German language, connected with Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Use of ICT in a language research institute is twofold. On the one hand, ICT provides basic services for researches to accomplish their daily work. On the other hand, several national and international institutions have a strong interest in ICT. Therefore, ICT can also be seen as an amplifier for language research. The first part of this paper reports on the activates of the IDS in internal and external ICT-related projects and initiatives. The second part describes a general strategy towards an ICT strategy that could be useful both for the IDS and other national language institutes. We think such a general strategy is necessary to create a strong foundation not only for the ICT-related projects, but as a basis for a modem research institute.
This article shows that the TEI tag set for feature structures can be adopted to represent a heterogeneous set of linguistic corpora. The majority of corpora is annotated using markup languages that are based on the Annotation Graph framework, the upcoming Linguistic Annotation Format ISO standard, or according to tag sets defined by or based upon the TEI guidelines. A unified representation comprises the separation of conceptually different annotation layers contained in the original corpus data (e.g. syntax, phonology, and semantics) into multiple XML files. These annotation layers are linked to each other implicitly by the identical textual content of all files. A suitable data structure for the representation of these annotations is a multi-rooted tree that again can be represented by the TEI and ISO tag set for feature structures. The mapping process and representational issues are discussed as well as the advantages and drawbacks associated with the use of the TEI tag set for feature structures as a storage and exchange format for linguistically annotated data.
We describe a general two-stage procedure for re-using a custom corpus for spoken language system development involving a transformation from character-based markup to XML, and DSSSL stylesheet-driven XML markup enhancement with multiple lexical tag trees. The procedure was used to generate a fully tagged corpus; alternatively with greater economy of computing resources, it can be employed as a parametrised ‘tagging on demand’ filter. The implementation will shortly be released as a public resource together with the corpus (German spoken dialogue, about 500k word form tokens) and lexicon (about 75k word form types).
The Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) was established in Mannheim in 1964. Since then, it has been at the forefront of innovation in German linguistics as a hub for digital language data. This chapter presents various lessons learnt from over five decades of work by the IDS, ranging from the importance of sustainability, through its strong technical base and FAIR principles, to the IDS’ role in national and international cooperation projects and its expertise on legal and ethical issues related to language resources and language technology.
This article introduces the topic of ‘‘Multilingual language resources and interoperability’’. We start with a taxonomy and parameters for classifying language resources. Later we provide examples and issues of interoperatability, and resource architectures to solve such issues. Finally we discuss aspects of linguistic formalisms and interoperability.
An approach to the unification of XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents with identical textual content and concurrent markup in the framework of XML-based multi-layer annotation is introduced. A Prolog program allows the possible relationships between element instances on two annotation layers that share PCDATA to be explored and also the computing of a target node hierarchy for a well-formed, merged XML document. Special attention is paid to identity conflicts between element instances, for which a default solution that takes into account metarelations that hold between element types on the different annotation layers is provided. In addition, rules can be specified by a user to prescribe how identity conflicts should be solved for certain element types.
Das vorliegende Papier fasst den bisherigen Diskussionsstand zur Konzeption eines Organisationsmodells für die institutionelle Verstetigung des Verbundforschungsprojektes TextGrid zusammen und bündelt die bisherigen Arbeitsergebnisse im Arbeitspaket 3 – Strukturelle und organisatorische Nachhaltigkeit. Das hier skizzierte Organisationsmodell basiert auf den in D-Grid und WissGrid erarbeiteten Nachhaltigkeitskonzepten und adaptiert das Konzept der Virtuellen Organisation (VO) für TextGrid. Insgesamt strebt TextGrid eine institutionelle Verstetigung seiner Aktivitäten nach Ende der Projektlaufzeit an und beabsichtigt gemeinsam mit Virtuellen Forschungsumgebungen aus anderen Wissenschaftsdisziplinen Wege und Prozesse etablieren zu können. Am 24./25. Februar 2011 hat TextGrid einen Strategie-Workshop in Berlin ausgerichtet, zu dem sich eine Expertenrunde zur „Nachhaltigkeit von Virtuellen Forschungsumgebungen“ eingefunden hat. Diskutiert werden wird, wie Virtuelle Forschungsumgebungen basierend auf heutigen finanziellen und organisatorischen Strukturen nachhaltig sein können und welche Empfehlungen sich daraus für TextGrid ableiten. Die Diskussionsergebnisse der Expertenrunde werden zusammen mit den Überlegungen in diesem Papier in die Konzeption eines umfassenderen Organisationsmodells einfließen, das die Grundlage für eine Verstetigung von TextGrid bilden wird.
In the mid-1990s, the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary-Studies at Bielefeld University began to establish the field Text technology, both in research and education. Text technology is a new field of research on the border of Computational Linguistics and Computational Philology.
This paper focuses on Text technology in academic education. In 2002, Text Technology was introduced as a minor subject for B.A. Programs. It is organized in modules: Module 1 introduces the characteristics of electronic texts and documents, typography, typesetting systems and hypertext. Module 2 introduces one or two programming languages relevant to the field of humanities computing. Markup languages and the principles of information structuring are the main topics of Module 3. The formal fundamentals of computer-based text processing, as formal languages and their grammars, Logics et cetera are subjects of another module. The paper ends with a short description of other Bachelor- and Master-Programs at Bielefeld University which contain text technological themes.
The actual or anticipated impact of research projects can be documented in scientific publications and project reports. While project reports are available at varying level of accessibility, they might be rarely used or shared outside of academia. Moreover, a connection between outcomes of actual research project and potential secondary use might not be explicated in a project report. This paper outlines two methods for classifying and extracting the impact of publicly funded research projects. The first method is concerned with identifying impact categories and assigning these categories to research projects and their reports by extension by using subject matter experts; not considering the content of research reports. This process resulted in a classification schema that we describe in this paper. With the second method which is still work in progress, impact categories are extracted from the actual text data.
SGML und Linguistik
(1999)
Im Zentrum der Dissertation steht der Begriff Informationsmodellierung oder genauer der Begriff der "textuellen Informationsmodellierung", wobei auf einer bereits vorgeschlagenen Unterscheidung einer primären und einer sekundären Ebene der Informationsstrukturierung aufgebaut wird. Der Gegenstand der primären Ebene sind die textuellen Daten selbst sowie ihre Strukturierung, wohingegen die sekundäre Ebene beschreibt, wie die für die primären Ebenen verwendeten Regelwerke mit alternativen Regelwerken in Beziehung gesetzt werden können. Der Einteilung in eine primäre und eine sekundäre Informationsstrukturierung wird in der Dissertation das Konzept der multiplen Informationsstrukturierung nebengeordnet. Dieses Konzept ist so zu verstehen, dass die primäre Ebene bei Bedarf vervielfacht wird - jedoch bezieht sich jede dieser Ebenen auf dieselbe Datengrundlage. Hierbei ergeben sich auch Auswirkungen auf die sekundäre Informationsstrukturierung. Die Informationsmodellierung erfolgt mit Auszeichnungssprachen. Die Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) stellt hierfür einen Rahmen dar, jedoch wurde dieser Formalismus seit seiner 1986 erfolgten Standardisierung nicht nur weiterentwickelt, sondern es wurde mit der Extensible Markup Language (XML) im Jahr 1998 eine wesentlich einfachere Untermenge dieser Sprache definiert, die zudem das derzeitige Zentrum weiterer Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der Auszeichnungssprachen darstellt. Der entwickelte Ansatz zur Modellierung linguistischer Information basiert auf der Extensible Markup Language (XML), wobei die weitergehenden Möglichkeiten von SGML selbstverständlich ebenfalls dargestellt und diskutiert werden. Mittels XML können Informationen, die sich nicht in bestimmten Hierarchien (mittels mathematischer Bäume) strukturieren lassen, nicht in einer natürlichen Weise repräsentiert werden. Eine Lösung dieses Problems liegt in der Aufteilung der Strukturierung auf verschiedene Ebenen. Diese neue Lösung wird dargestellt, diskutiert und modelliert.
Sprachverarbeitung mit getypten Attribut-Wert-Matrizen. Dependenzgrammatik und Konzeptuelle Semantik
(1996)
In dieser Arbeit wurden die Dependenzgrammatik und die Konzeptuelle Semantik formalisiert. Als Ausgangspunkt dafür diente eine detaillierte Darstellung der formalen Grundlage. Diese wurden im Kapitel 1 erarbeitet. Nicht alle in diesem Kapitel entwickelten Konzepte wurden in den späteren Kapiteln aufgegriffen. Ich halte es aber für sinnvoll die mathematischen Eigenschaften eines Formalismus ausführlich darzustellen, bevor dieser zur Anwendung gebracht wird. Die beschriebenen Eigenschaften sind dem Formalismus immanent. Auf die Einführung von Erweiterungen, z.B. die Definition von Mengen, wurde verzichtet, da sie im weiteren Verlauf keine Verwendung finden.
Im Kapitel 2 wird gezeigt, dass die Dependenzgrammatik mit dem dargestellten Formalismus beschrieben werden kann. Damit wurde eine Formalisierung erreicht, die zeigt, dass der seltene Einsatz dieser traditionsreichen Grammatiktheorie in der Computerlinguistik, zumindest aus formalen Gründen, nicht gerechtfertigt ist.
Das Kapitel 3 stellt die Konzeptuelle Semantik vor. Die ursprüngliche Formalisierung dieser Theorie wurde kritisiert. Es wurde gezeigt, dass die Beschreibung der Konzepte durch getypte Attribut-Wert-Matrizen eine bessere Alternative der formalen Darstellung ist. Desweiteren wurden einerseits Vereinfachungen (z.B. der Verzicht auf die Dekomposition der Konzepte) und andererseits Erweiterungen (d.h. insbesondere eine Erweiterung des Inventars der ontologischen Kategorien) vorgeschlagen.
Nachdem diese beiden linguistischen Theorien mit demselben formalen Apparat dargestellt wurden, wurde im Kapitel 4 dargestellt, dass sie sich ergänzen. In dem skizzierten Sprachverarbeitungssystem werden die syntaktische und die semantische Struktur parallel aufgebaut. Es ist erkennbar, dass sich beide Theorien ergänzen. Es wurde darüber hinaus gezeigt, dass ein solches System eine sehr gut geeignete Basis zur maschinellen Verarbeitung defizitärer sprachlicher Äußerungen bildet.
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.
Overlap in markup occurs where some markup structures do not nest, such as where the structural division of the text into lists, sections, etc., differs from the syntactic division of the text into sentences and phrases. The Multiple Annotation solution to this problem (redundant encoding in multiple forms) 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. But it has the significant disadvantage of independence of the separate files. These multiply annotated 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) can be programmatically derived and used together for editing, for inference, or for unification of the multiply annotated documents.
Die zentrale Aufgabenstellung des Verbundprojektes TextTransfer (Pilot) war eine Machbarkeitsprüfung für die Entwicklung eines Text-Mining-Verfahrens, mit dem Forschungsergebnisse automatisiert auf Hinweise zu Transfer- und Impactpotenzialen untersucht werden können. Das vom Projektkoordinator IDS verantwortete Teilprojekt konzentrierte sich dabei auf die Entwicklung der methodischen Grundlagen, während der Projektpartner TIB vornehmlich für die Bereitstellung eines geeigneten Datensatzes verantwortlich war. Solchen automatisierten Verfahren liegen zumeist textbasierte Daten als physisches Manifest wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse zugrunde, die im Falle von TextTransfer (Pilot) als empirische Grundlage herangezogen wurden. Das im Verbund zur Anwendung gebrachte maschinelle Lernverfahren stützte sich ausschließlich auf deutschsprachige Projektendberichte öffentlich geförderter Forschung. Diese Textgattung eignet sich insbesondere hinsichtlich ihrer öffentlichen Verfügbarkeit bei zuständigen Gedächtnisorganisationen und aufgrund ihrer im Vergleich zu anderen Formaten wissenschaftlicher Publikation relativen strukturellen wie sprachlichen Homogenität. TextTransfer (Pilot) ging daher grundsätzlich von der Annahme struktureller bzw. sprachlicher Ähnlichkeit in Berichtstexten aus, bei denen der Nachweis tatsächlich erfolgten Transfers zu erbringen war. Im Folgenden wird in diesen Fällen von Texten bzw. textgebundenen Forschungsergebnissen mit Transfer- und Impactpotenzial gesprochen werden. Es wurde ferner postuliert, dass sich diese Indizien von sprachlichen Eigenschaften in Texten zu Projekten ohne nachzuweisenden bzw. ggf. auch niemals erfolgtem, aber potenziell möglichem Transfer oder Impact unterscheiden lassen. Mit einer Verifizierung dieser Annahmen war es möglich, Transfer- oder Impactwahrscheinlichkeiten in großen Mengen von Berichtsdaten ohne eingehende Lektüre zu prognostizieren.
Das vom BMBF geförderte Verbundprojekt CLARIAH-DE, an dem über 25 Partnerinstitutionen mitwirken, unter ihnen auch das IDS, hat zum Ziel, mit der Entwicklung einer Forschungsinfrastruktur zahlreiche Angebote zur Verfügung zu stellen, die die Bedingungen der Forschungsarbeit mit digitalen Werkzeugen, Diensten sowie umfangreichen Datenbeständen im Bereich der geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschung und benachbarter Disziplinen verbessern. Die in CLARIAH-DE entwickelte Infrastruktur bietet den Forschenden Unterstützung bei der Analyse und Aufbereitung von Sprachdaten für linguistische Untersuchungen in unterschiedlichsten Anwendungskontexten und leistet somit einen Beitrag zur Entwicklung der NFDI.
Die durch die Covid-19-Pandemie bedingte Umstellung der Präsenzlehre auf digitale Lehr- und Lernformate stellte Lehrende und Studierende gleichermaßen vor eine Herausforderung. Innerhalb kürzester Zeit musste die Nutzung von Plattformen und digitalen Tools erlernt und getestet werden. Der Beitrag stellt exemplarisch Dienste und Werkzeuge von CLARIAH-DE vor und erläutert, wie die digitale Forschungsinfrastruktur Lehrende und Studierende auch im Rahmen der digitalen Lehre unterstützen kann.
Communication across all language barriers has long been a goal of humankind. In recent years, new technologies have enabled this at least partially. New approaches and different methods in the field of Machine Translation (MT) are continuously being improved, modified, and combined, as well. Significant progress has already been achieved in this area; many automatic translation tools, such as Google Translate and Babelfish, can translate not only short texts, but also complete web pages in real time. In recent years, new advances are being made in the mobile area; Googles Translate app for Android and iOS, for example, can recognize and translate words within photographs taken by the mobile device (to translate a restaurant menu, for instance). Despite this progress, a “perfect” machine translation system seems to be an impossibility because a machine translation system, however advanced, will always have some limitations. Human languages contain many irregularities and exceptions, and consequently go through a constant process of change, which is difficult to measure or to be processed automatically. This paper gives a short introduction of the state of the art of MT. It examines the following aspects: types of MT, the most conventional and widely developed approaches, and also the advantages and disadvantages of these different paradigms.
The present submission reports on a pilot project conducted at the Institute for the German Language (IDS), aiming at strengthening the connection between ISO TC37SC4 “Language Resource Management” and the CLARIN infrastructure. In terminology management, attempts have recently been made to use graph-theoretical analyses to get a better understanding of the structure of terminology resources. The project described here aims at applying some of these methods to potentially incomplete concept fields produced over years by numerous researchers serving as experts and editors of ISO standards. The main results of the project are twofold. On the one hand, they comprise concept networks dynamically generated from a relational database and browsable by the user. On the other, the project has yielded significant qualitative feedback that will be offered to ISO. We provide the institutional context of this endeavour, its theoretical background, and an overview of data preparation and tools used. Finally, we discuss the results and illustrate some of them.
The paper discusses two topics: firstly an approach of using multiple layers of annotation is sketched out. Regarding the XML representation this approach is similar to standoff annotation. A second topic is the use of heterogeneous linguistic resources (e.g., XML annotated documents, taggers, lexical nets) as a source for semiautomatic multi-dimensional markup to resolve typical linguistic issues, dealing with anaphora resolution as a case study.
Research today is often performed in collaborated projects composed of project partners with different backgrounds and from different institutions and countries. Standards can be a crucial tool to help harmonizing these differences and to create sustainable resources. However, choosing a standard depends on having enough information to evaluate and compare different annotation and metadata formats. In this paper we present ongoing work on an interactive, collaborative website that collects information on standards in the field of linguistics as a means to guide interested researchers.
Digital research infrastructures can be divided into four categories: large equipment, IT infrastructure, social infrastructure, and information infrastructure. Modern research institutions often employ both IT infrastructure and information infrastructure, such as databases or large-scale research data. In addition, information infrastructure depends to some extent on IT infrastructure. In this paper, we discuss the IT, information, and legal infrastructure issues that research institutions face.
The motivation for this article is to describe a methodology for interrelating and analyzing language and theory-specific corpus data from various languages. As an example phenomeon we use information structure (IS, see [3]) in treebanks from three languages: Spanish, Korean and Japanese. Korean and Japanese are typologically close, while both are typologically different from Spanish. Therefore, the problem of annotating IS is that there are diverging language-specific formal linguistic means for the realization of IS-functions (like “topicalization / contrast”) on various levels like prosody, morphology and word-order. Hence, it is necessary to describe the relations between language-specific formal means and functional views on IS, and how to operationalize these relations for corpus analysis.
TEI Feature Structures as a Representation Format for Multiple Annotation and Generic XML Documents
(2009)
Feature structures are mathematical entities (rooted labeled directed acyclic graphs) that can be represented as graph displays, attribute value matrices or as XML adhering to the constraints of a specialized TEI tag set. We demonstrate that this latter ISO-standardized format can be used as an integrative storage and exchange format for sets of multiple annotation XML documents. This specific domain of application is rooted in the approach of multiple annotations, which marks a possible solution for XML-compliant markup in scenarios with conflicting annotation hierarchies. A more extreme proposal consists in the possible use as a meta-representation format for generic XML documents. For both scenarios our strategy concerning pertinent feature structure representations is grounded on the XDM (XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model). The ubiquitous hierarchical and sequential relationships within XML documents are represented by specific features that take ordered list values. The mapping to the TEI feature structure format has been implemented in the form of an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet. It can be characterized as exploiting aspects of both the push and pull processing paradigm as appropriate. An indexing mechanism is provided with regard to the multiple annotation documents scenario. Hence, implicit links concerning identical primary data are made explicit in the result format. In comparison to alternative representations, the TEI-based format does well in many respects, since it is both integrative and well-formed XML. However, the result documents tend to grow very large depending on the size of the input documents and their respective markup structure. This may also be considered as a downside regarding the proposed use for generic XML documents. On the positive side, it may be possible to achieve a hookup to methods and applications that have been developed for feature structure representations in the fields of (computational) linguistics and knowledge representation.
Igel is a small XQuery-based web application for examining a collection of document grammars; in particular, for comparing related document grammars to get a better overview of their differences and similarities. In its initial form, Igel reads only DTDs and provides only simple lists of constructs in them (elements, attributes, notations, parameter entities). Our continuing work is aimed at making Igel provide more sophisticated and useful information about document grammars and building the application into a useful tool for the analysis (and the maintenance!) of families of related document grammars
This paper describes a new research initiative addressing the issue of sustainability of linguistic resources. The initiative is a cooperation between three collaborative research centres in Germany – the SFB 441 “Linguistic Data Structures” in Tübingen, the SFB 538 “Multilingualism” in Hamburg, and the SFB 632 “Information Structure” in Potsdam/Berlin. The aim of the project is to develop methods for sustainable archiving of the diverse bodies of linguistic data used at the three sites. In the first half of the paper, the data handling solutions developed so far at the three centres are briefly introduced. This is followed by an assessment of their commonalities and differences and of what these entail for the work of the new joint initiative. The second part then sketches seven areas of open questions with respect to sustainable data handling and gives a more detailed account of two of them – integration of linguistic terminologies and development of best practice guidelines.
This paper deals with the problem of how to interrelate theory-specific treebanks and how to transform one treebank format to another. Currently, two approaches to achieve these goals can be differentiated. The first creates a mapping algorithm between treebank formats. Categories of a source format are transformed into a target format via a given set of general or language-specific mapping rules. The second relates treebanks via a transformation to a general model of linguistic categories, for example based on the EAGLES recommendations for syntactic annotations of corpora, or relying on the HPSG framework. This paper proposes a new methodology as a solution for these desiderata.
This paper proposes a methodology for querying linguistic data represented in different corpus formats. Examples of the need for queries over such heterogeneous resources are the corpus-based analysis of multimodal phenomena like the interaction of gestures and prosodic features, or syntax-related phenomena like information structure which exceed the expressive power of a tree-centered corpus format. Query languages (QLs) currently under development are strongly connected to corpus formats, like the NITE Object Model (NOM, Carletta et al., 2003) or the Meta-Annotation Infrastructure for ATLAS (MAIA, Laprun and Fiscus, 2002). The parallel development of linguistic query languages and corpus formats is due to the fact that general purpose query languages like XQuery (Boag et al., 2003) do not fulfill the changing needs of linguistically motivated queries, e.g. to give access to (non-)hierarchically organized, theory and language dependent annotations of multi modal signals and/or text. This leads to the problem that existing corpus formats and query languages are hard to reuse. They have to be re developed and re-implemented time-consumingly and expensively for unforeseen tasks. This paper describes an approach for overcoming these problems and a sample application.