That's awful.

This reminds me of the SSF or Shakti Standard Format. It looks like XML on the outside, but inside you find numbered lists in CDATA sections, nested parentheses, and when needed, values separated by colons and slashes and equal signs whenever someone felt they needed another level of a structure. If I remember correctly, there were 8 different types of markup, one of them even using < without quoting, making the files ill-formed XML.

<Sentence id="8">
1       ((      NP      <drel=k2:3>
1.1     biddalni        NN
        ))
2       ((      VGNF    <drel=vmod:1/name=3>
2.1     kanetappudu     VM
        ))
3       ((      NP      <drel=nmod:2>
3.1     eVMwo   INTF
3.2     maMxi   CL
        ))
4       ((      NP      <drel=k1:1/name=2>
4.1     wallulu NN
        ))
5       ((      VGF     <name=1>
5.1     canipowunnAru   VM
5.2     .       SYM
        ))
</Sentence>
[download]

Do you see the :X parts? They are in fact references to the name=X "anchors"!

Why do I know? I needed to convert some of their data into a different format. Thankfully, I could use Perl and regexes. Tears of joy.