[CWB] empty element

[Hardie, Andrew]

The alternative solution is just to represent empty tags as opening tags. There will then be an implicit closing tag before the next tag of the same sort - which you can ignore. Then, you can search for for instance

    <pause> []

to get words after a pause (after a "begin-pause" literally, but you know the begin-pause actually represents the point-position of the pause).

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it <cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it> On Behalf Of Stefan Evert
Sent: 11 May 2020 16:15
To: CWBdev Mailing List <cwb at sslmit.unibo.it>
Subject: Re: [CWB] empty element


> I have problems with a <pause></pause> xml tag in a spoken corpus.
> If I run a query, for example to look at all the words following or preceding a pause, I get no results, both in CWB and in CQPweb. I guess that the problem is that it is an empty element, without any text inside the xml tags.

Exactly: CWB doesn't support empty XML elements, all s-attribute regions must enclose one or more tokens.  And for good reason, as empty elements are a major pain in the corpus.

> How do you suggest to solve this problem?

BNCweb solves this problem by encoding such empty tags before the current token as a p-attribute, either in XML notation, e.g.

        <pause/><noise/>

or as a feature set

        |noise|pause|

so it is easier to query for a specific tag, e.g with

        [tags_before contains "pause"]

In fact, BNCweb stores _all_ XML tags (not just empty ones) before and after the current position in two separate p-attributes, which makes it a lot easier to reconstruct the original XML markup in the context display.

Best,
Stefan

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