It's more than just overlap: Text As Graph

Abstract

The XML tree paradigm has several well-known limitations for document modeling and processing. Some of these have received a lot of attention (especially overlap), and some have received less (e.g., discontinuity, simultaneity, transposition, white space as crypto-overlap). Many of these have work-arounds, also well known, but—as is implicit in the term “work-around”—these work-arounds have disadvantages. Because they get the job done, however, and because XML has a large user community with diverse levels of technological expertise, it is difficult to overcome inertia and move to a technology that might offer a more comprehensive fit with the full range of document structures with which researchers need to interact both intellectually and programmatically. A high-level analysis of why XML has the limitations it has can enable us to explore how an alternative model of Text as Graph (TAG) might address these types of structures and tasks in a more natural and idiomatic way than is available within an XML paradigm.