The CLaRK System: XML-based Corpora Development System for Rapid Prototyping

The paper presents the CLaRK System as a tool for the creation of XML-based corpora and a platform for rapid prototyping. The system provides a set of basic tools for processing XML documents. These tools include: tokenizers, regular grammars, constraints; remove, insert, extract, sort, transformation operations. Additionally, the system is equipped with a macro language which allows the creation of tools sequences. The macro language includes a set of control operators for guiding the application of the tools in the macro. Usually, a tool or a macro works over a single document changing it or producing a new document. In some cases processing of more than one document is necessary — in iterative statistics for treebank transformation, stand-off annotation, etc. For such processing the macro language allows a dynamic change of the processed documents.