This is a collaborative effort among three universities (Columbia, Rochester, and Pittsburgh) to construct, evaluate, and disseminate a package of Corpus Analysis Resources for Discourse (CARD). The goal is to provide the means for a large-scale, robust analysis of language use, both within and across distinct types of discourse corpora. The three components of CARD are a Discourse Annotation Language (DAL) to encode information pertaining to language use directly within discourse corpora; reliability measures of the degree of variability in DAL annotations; and a library of DAL-annotated corpora, varying in modality, number of participants, domain, and communicative task. DAL follows the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines and is implemented in Standard Generalized Markup Language to facilitate common authoring and editing utilities. DAL is a modular language with five layers of linguistic representation: morpho-syntactic, prosodic, anaphoric, lexical, and segmental.
