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Recommendations

Conclusion: Manageable levels of achievement in specifying standards

The following degrees of standardisation may thus be recommended at the current stage:

Representation/encoding:
Observance of general principles of transparency, processability, brevity and unambiguity; translatability of annotation devices into a set of language-generic conventions.

Identifying categories/subcategories/structures:
Agreement on common categories, etc., across different languages, where these can be justified by linguistic analysis and descriptive tradition; allowance for variation, subject to three degrees of constraint: obligatory, recommended and optional specifications.

Annotation schemes and their application to texts:
Agreement merely on the requirement that annotation schemes should be made available to end-users and to other annotators, and should be as detailed as possible.