SCDL-NL as a Structured Annotation Language

In this paper, we categorize “semantics” into “taxonomical semantics”, “syntactical semantics” and “formal semantics”. We propose a declarative meta-language SCDL-NL as the foundation of a general annotation language in which “taxonomical and syntactical semantic” information of a sentence can be clearly defined. Since pure natural language is too complicated to be used as a general annotation language, the general annotation language imposes some restrictions on the English grammar so that it can be easily translated into SCDL-NL to facilitate information retrieval.