Annotating Documents by Their Intended Meaning to Make Them Self Explaining: An Essential Progress for the Semantic Web

Abstract

A Self-Explaining Document (SED) is a document enriched with annotations keeping track of all possible interpretations with respect to a given grammar and dictionary, as well as disambiguating choices. If disambiguation is complete and has been done by the author himself, a SED conveys “the author’s intention”. The availability of SEDs might considerably reduce misunderstanding between authors and readers, and perhaps lead to the assignment of a “meaning certification level” to any part of a document. We present ways to integrate these annotations into an arbitrary XML document (SED-XML), and to make them visible and usable to readers for accessing the “true content” of a document. We also show that, under several constraints, a SED, once translated into a target language L, might be transformed into an SED in L with no human interaction. Hence, the SED structure might be used in multilingual as well as in monolingual contexts, without addition of human work.