[sw-l] Sign Variants via SWML

[rocha at ATLAS.UCPEL.TCHE.BR]

Hi,

 Just a first reaction to Dan's message.

 I feel that his observation is accurate. Searching for signs with
variants will probably have to be dealt with mainly in the application
program, outside the DOM. That is, first doing a generic search
disregarding variants in the DOM, then filtering variants outside the
DOM.

 But I'm not sure about that.

 Antônio Carlos


> Sandy's suggestion should make searching for signs interesting (at
> least in XPath), since some signs will have the "variant" attribute and
> others won't. And since you can't predict which nodes have the
> attribute you have to somehow say "in searching, make sure that
> everything in the sign either has the same value for "variant"
> attribute or no such attribute at all." In other words, how would one
> within the DOM find the gloss for "flatfish", given the correct fill?
>
> It seems simpler to me to list each variant as separate signs, so
> something like this:
>
> <entry>
> <variant head="yes">
> <sign>...</sign>
> <semantics>...</semantics>
> </variant>
>
> <variant head="no">
> <sign>...<sign>
> <semantics>...</semantics>
> </variant>
> </entry>
>
> I'm punting here, and of course, the content of the "semantics"
> structure is dependent on whatever the application is (dictionary?
> Machine translation?). The "head" attributes potentially tells a
> lexicographer which variant(-s) should be considered as the head of an
> entry in the dictionary. And searching for variants as signs becomes
> much simpler. Once a single sign is found, either it can be dealt with
> on its own, or other members of the entry can be found by moving up the
> tree to the nearest "entry" node.
>
> This of course assumes that sacrificing storage for more optimal
> searches is acceptable.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dan.
>
>


-----------------------------
Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa
Escola de Informática - UCPel