DQD: the @ operator

The @ operator essentially expresses a character-wise containment relation. As such, it can only be applied to entities that are character-aligned, for example tokens or segments (unlike gesture annotations of video corpora that, typically, are not character-aligned).

It is a binary operator: it uses the syntax x@y, where y is a label referring to the entity that should contain the one being declared by x.

x can be of two types. First, it can be the name of an annotation layer in the corpus. For example, the block below means that the adverb token t1 should be part of the segment labeled s

 Segment s
    speaker.name = "Marcel"

 Token@s t1
    upos = "ADV"

Second, it can be the keyword sequence, in which case all the entities declared within the scope of the sequence must be contained within the labeled entity. For example, the block below means that we are looking for a named entity contained in a segment, which itselfs contains the sequence "Monte Rosa":

Segment s

NamedEntity@s ne

sequence@ne seq
    Token
        form = "Monte"
    Token
        form = "Rosa"