Annotating textual and speech data in Maltese

Abstract

The present document has been compiled in response to the call for contributions issued by the International Standards Organisation (ISO TC37/SC4 N047) towards the adoption of a morphosyntactic annotation framework. The document aims to contribute samples at the following levels, where the object language is Maltese: a. Tagging: Specifically, part of speech tagging. A tagset for Maltese is included in §3. In addition, a number of problems that arise in relation to the morphosyntactic annotation of Maltese textual documents are described and exemplified, as are current solutions where available, in §2. b. Annotation of transcribed speech. A small set of transcribed utterances are provided, on the basis of which some issues in their annotation are pointed out. Our aim in the compilation of this document has been primarily to draw attention to linguistic phenomena that should be accounted for in a broad-coverage annotation scheme which aims to include the greatest possible number of languages.