Importing MASC into the ANNIS linguistic database: A case study of mapping GrAF

This paper describes the importation of Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) data and annotations into the linguistic database ANNIS, which allows users to vi-sualize and query linguistically-annotated corpora. We outline the process of mapping MASC’s GrAF representation to ANNIS’s internal format relANNIS and demonstrate how the system provides ac-cess to multiple annotation layers in the corpus. This access provides information about inter-layer relations and dependen-cies that have been previously difficult to explore, and which are highly valuable for continued development of language pro-cessing applications.