RE: PLS and Part of Speech Tagging

Greetings Paolo,

Thanks very much for your overview of the PLS and on how W3C views the role attribute as an optional function. 

As an end-user of PLS, I must say that I am happy with all aspects of your documentation except with the documentation of the "role attribute".

My first disagreement with your comments is that you seem to regard the "role attribute" as a throw away feature of PLS. This is unfortunate, because the "role attribute" is the most important concept and feature in PLS and far more effort should be made by W3C to show a completed working example of the "role attribute".

Second, with no intentions of being disrespectful, your reply was circular and essentially just summed up the documentation that is currently on your website, which you indicated was not adequate.

Third, you indicated that xmlns:mypos="http://www.example.org/my_pos_namespace" should be replaced with a real and stable URI (possibly an official one provided by the CLAWS people, or other organizations for different POS values)”. 

This is easier said that done as my following email of June 20th below indicates:

<< Start of Email >>
Greetings Dr Rayson,

As a follow-up to my earlier e-mail, can you inform me if the Free CLAWS WWW trial service URI: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/trial.html could be modified to work with a Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) file and used to replace the dummy line:


xmlns:mypos="http://www.example.org/my_pos_namespace"

If this is possible, please provide the modified URI

Thank You,
Percival A. Henry, Ph.D.

<< End of Email>

As indicated in the above email, the CLAWS part-of-speech tagger (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) now offers free part of speech tagging for up to 100,000 words at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/trial.html.  

Unfortunately, I have received no reply to the request made in the email noted above because I do not believe Dr Rayson (who is an academic) has the technical know how to modify the URI to make it workable with PLS.  I do however, believe that W3C should have the technical capability to modify the free CLAWS URI to provide a workable URI for the "role attribute".

Fourth, my question about using the Stanford part of speech tagger as an alternative to the CLAWS tagger was not taken seriously.  See for example, the following post: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/java-nlp-user/2013-June/003672.html.  As the posting indicate, the academic institutions that create these part of speech taggers do not consider it their responsibility to create URIs for them.

Until you can give end users a simple workable URI to replace the dummy URI, the most important conceptual breakthrough in PLS will remain for the most part useless.

Best Regards,

Percy Henry
From: Paolo.Baggia@nuance.com
To: phenry1026@hotmail.com
CC: Paolo.Baggia@nuance.com; www-voice@w3.org
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 14:23:48 +0000
Subject: PLS and Part of Speech Tagging