ABSTRACT
The chief concerns of text processing for interpretational purposes remain information retrieval, content management, or knowledge representation and extraction. A text has to be conceived, equally in a digital environment, as a semiotic system. The mapping of the text onto itself can be performed by markup that gives explicit expression to implicit structural features of the text. The application of the extended string' data type to text critical problems' has proved to be a substantial step towards reaching satisfactory solutions', and its application to problems of analysis and interpretation looks just as promising on the same grounds'. The examination and testing of these new possibilities opens up a new, promising direction for research, in the conviction that only an improved form of low-level text representation can allow semantic and content-based text processing and afford an effective transfer of linguistic competence from the human reader to the machine.
