Such glosses help the reader follow the relationship between the source text and its translation, and the structure of the original language.
In its simplest form, an interlinear gloss is a literal, word-for-word translation of the source text.
Such annotations have occasionally been expressed not through interlinear layout, but rather through enumeration of words in the object and meta language.
One such example is Wilhelm von Humboldt's annotation of Classical Nahuatl:[1] 1ni-1ich2c-3mache3chihui2es4-lia4für5in5der6no-6mein7piltzin7Sohn8ce8ein9calli9Haus1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9ni- c- chihui -lia in no- piltzin ce calli1 3 2 4 5 6 7 8 9ich mache es für der mein Sohn ein HausThis "inline" style allows examples to be included within the flow of text, and for the word order of the target language to be written in an order which approximates the target language syntax.
(In the gloss here, mache es is reordered from the corresponding source order to approximate German syntax more naturally.)
Finally, modern linguists have adopted the practice of using abbreviated grammatical category labels.
A 2008 publication which repeats this example labels it as follows:[2] ni-c-chihui-lia1SG.SUBJ-3SG.OBJ-mach-APPLinDETno-piltzin1SG.POSS-SohnceeincalliHausni-c-chihui-lia in no-piltzin ce calli1SG.SUBJ-3SG.OBJ-mach-APPL DET 1SG.POSS-Sohn ein HausThis approach is denser and also requires effort to read, but it is less reliant on the grammatical structure of the metalanguage for expressing the semantics of the target forms.
For example: oda-danroom-ABLroom-fromhız-lıspeed-COMspeed-withçık-tı-mgo.out-PFV-1sggo_out-perfective-ITurkish oda-dan hız-lı çık-tı-mroom-ABL speed-COM go.out-PFV-1sgroom-from speed-with go_out-perfective-I'I left the room quickly.
may be set off by angle brackets, and reduplication with tildes, rather than with hyphens: sulatwritesu~sulatcontemplative mood~writes⟨um⟩ulat⟨agent trigger.past⟩writes⟨um⟩u~sulat⟨agent trigger⟩contemplative~writesulat su~sulat s⟨um⟩ulat s⟨um⟩u~sulatwrite contemplative mood~write ⟨agent trigger.past⟩write ⟨agent trigger⟩contemplative~write(See affix for other examples.)
Morphemes which cannot be easily separated out, such as umlaut, may be marked with a backslash rather than a period: unser-nour-DAT.PLVäter-nfather\PL-DAT.PL(German) unser-n Väter-nour-DAT.PL father\PL-DAT.PL'to our fathers' (the singular of Väter 'fathers' is Vater)A few other conventions which are sometimes seen are illustrated in the Leipzig Glossing Rules.
The automatic construction stage itself was completed in three steps: In the manual correction phase, the database creators manually corrected the boundaries of the interlinear gloss instances discovered by the sequence-labelling method in Step 2 of the automatic construction phase.
[7][8] Natural Language Processing systems, for example, have been developed to automatically produce interlinear glosses.
A statistical machine learning model for morphological inflection can be used to fill in the missing entries.