The MATE Markup Framework

Since early 1998, the European Telematics project MATE has worked towards facilitating re-use of annotated spoken language data, addressing theoretical issues and implementing practical solutions which could serve as standards in the field. The resulting MATE Workbench for corpus annotation is now available as licensed open source software.This paper describes the MATE markup framework which bridges between the theoretical and the practical activities of MATE and is proposed as a standard for the definition and representation of markup for spoken dialogue corpora. We also present early experience from use of the framework.