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# The MULI Project: Annotation and Analysis of Information Structure in German and English

**Authors:** Stefan Baumann, Caren Brinckmann, [Silvia Hansen-Schirra](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/silvia-hansen-schirra/) et al. · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L04-1102](https://aclanthology.org/L04-1102/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only; the treebank texts: evaluation only

[**56** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W50132873) openalex · 2026-10-19[**3** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/baumann-2004-muli-project-annotation-analysis-information/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L04-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L04-1102/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L04-1102.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/5m6hv2qjdkze](https://doi.org/10.63317/5m6hv2qjdkze)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W50132873)

**Authors (9)**

1. [Stefan Baumann](https://openalex.org/A5042326281) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7302-7103) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/47750851) · h 53 · 10632 citations · 603 works
2. [Caren Brinckmann](https://openalex.org/A5064365660) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3028071) · h 6 · 203 citations · 22 works
3. Silvia Hansen-Schirra
4. [Geert-Jan Kruijff](https://openalex.org/A5002167578) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1708708) · h 24 · 1939 citations · 107 works
5. Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová
6. [Stella Neumann](https://openalex.org/A5080395808) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3737-7867) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/39432485) · h 22 · 1456 citations · 109 works
7. [Erich Steiner](https://openalex.org/A5111738613) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8895-4380) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/50768866) · h 52 · 9955 citations · 314 works
8. [Elke Teich](https://openalex.org/A5007367807) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9936-7173) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2985148) · h 19 · 1345 citations · 136 works
9. [Hans Uszkoreit](https://openalex.org/A5112249167) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1781790) · h 29 · 4757 citations · 540 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

MULI is a pilot project that annotates information structure in German and English newspaper text without using theory-bound labels such as topic/focus or theme/rheme. The annotation works on three levels: syntax (non-canonical word order such as fronting, clefts, passives, there-insertion), discourse (each referent's type, delimitation, quantification and Prince's information status: new, unused, inferable, evoked; plus coreference and bridging links) and prosody (ToBI accents and breaks, read aloud by one German and one English speaker). The corpus is 250 German sentences (about 3,500 tokens) from the TIGER treebank and 320 English sentences (about 7,000 tokens) from the Penn Treebank, both economic news. Two annotators worked with MMAX. The paper has no accuracy figures. It shows one annotated English sequence in detail, where three of four clauses have non-canonical order, and it argues that the co-occurrence of the three levels is the way to see how each language marks information structure.

## Ideas

- I1. An information-status labeller for English referents, using Prince's four classes (new, unused, inferable, evoked) and the rule that a definite NP whose head is linked to an earlier entity through a relation (*the crash of the market*) is inferable. Keep the link and the rule in the output.
- I2. Fronting detector over UD trees: a clause whose first constituent is an adjunct or object before the subject, with the subject after the finite verb, is marked as non-canonical. The paper's three fronted clauses in its example are a test set.
- I3. Co-occurrence table: how often fronting, passive and there-insertion occur with each information-status class. Build it from the parsed English texts in Mova's own data and report the counts, not a claim about the language.
- I4. Negative control: a sentence with canonical order and a new-information subject must not get the fronting label or the evoked-status label. Count false labels on a set of such sentences.

## For Mova

The chapters are [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/) (fronting, clefts, there-insertion and information structure), [28. Voice and the passive](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/28-voice-and-passive/) (the passive that brings the patient to subject) and [35. Reference and coreference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/) (bridging and the status of referents). The code is `en/src/lin.rs` (word order from the tree), `coref/src/mention.rs` (the mention and its status) and `world/src/story.rs` (the entities already in the text). Prosody is out of scope for Mova, which works on text only. The measures: precision of the fronting detector and of the information-status labeller on the paper's example sequence, run twice for identical output, and the false-label rate of the negative-control sentences.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/5m6hv2qjdkze](https://doi.org/10.63317/5m6hv2qjdkze)

```
@inproceedings{baumann2004muli,
  title = {{The MULI Project: Annotation and Analysis of Information Structure in German and English}},
  author = {Baumann, Stefan and Brinckmann, Caren and Hansen-Schirra, Silvia and Kruijff, Geert-Jan and Kruijff-Korbayová, Ivana and Neumann, Stella and Steiner, Erich and Teich, Elke and Uszkoreit, Hans},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04)},
  year = {2004},
  doi = {10.63317/5m6hv2qjdkze},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5m6hv2qjdkze}
}
```

- [← previous On the syntax of object pronouns in Old English and Early Middle English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bastiani-2020-syntax-object-pronouns-old-english/)
- [next → Recognition of They/Them as Singular Personal Pronouns in Coreference Resolution](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/baumler-2022-recognition-they-them-as-singular/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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