Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 10:14:18 -0400 (EDT)
X-Authentication-Warning: diamond.cs.columbia.edu: klavans set sender to klavans@diamond.cs.columbia.edu using -f
From: Judith Klavans <klavans@cs.columbia.edu>
To: yarowsky@cs.jhu.edu
cc: klavans@cs.columbia.edu
Subject: Re: ACL Annual Report and October 4 dinner


David,

No, I won't be at Hong Kong, sorry to say.  PLease pass on my regrets
to Priscilla and of course to you.

ACL had been supporting the TEI, significantly.  Truthfully, Don and a
handful of visionaries realized over a decade ago how critical markup
would be for NLP.  We see this recycled in Steven Bird's efforts to
pull together the 35 or so different annotation schemata people have
home-grown.

TEI was solid, good community effort, well-funded, but never took off
in the CL community.  It is big big big in the libraries, humanities
world.  Maybe there are fewer divas than in the CL world, where we all
think our annotation schemata are the only "real" ones.  Hard to say.
Humanities scholars have been less resistant to adoping TEI, and now
XML compliant TEI, for markup.  We use this in our own group at
Columbia, but I believe we are in a small set in the CL community.

So the bottom line is that I think the TEI report falls on deaf ears
in the CL community, and is probably worth giving up.  I would,
however, like to have this brought up at the exec meeting so that it
goes on record that TEI support and reports are now officially over.

Don Walker would not be pleased, but he would also not be pleased if
it were not dealt with properly.

Thanks,

Judith