A Practical Introduction to ATLAS

In this paper we introduce the ATLAS [Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems] architecture by describing how a proposed annotation task would be modeled using ATLAS concepts. We first present a brief motivation for this work and then move on to describe an example annotation task that will serve as the basis for this paper. Next we model the example task using ATLAS. We describe how the introduction of the new Meta-Annotation construct enables us to move forward by allowing unambiguous description of the annotation task and modeling of relations between the different annotation elements. We conclude by describing the current state of the ATLAS framework.