Overview of Annotation Creation: Processes & Tools

Creating linguistic annotations requires more than just a reliable annotation scheme. Annotation can be a complex endeavour potentially involving many people, stages, and tools. This chapter outlines the process of creating end-toend linguistic annotations, identifying specific tasks that researchers often perform. Because tool support is so central to achieving high quality, reusable annotations with low cost, the focus is on identifying capabilities that are necessary or useful for annotation tools, as well as common problems these tools present that reduce their utility. Although examples of specific tools are provided in many cases, this chapter concentrates more on abstract capabilities and problems because new tools appear continuously, while old tools disappear into disuse or disrepair. The two core capabilities tools must have are support for the chosen annotation scheme and the ability to work on the language under study. Additional capabilities are organized into three categories: those that are widely provided; those that often useful but found in only a few tools; and those that have as yet little or no available tool support.  More than just a scheme Creating manually annotated linguistic corpora requires more than just a reliable annotation scheme. A reliable scheme, of course, is a central ingredient to successful annotation; but even the most carefully designed scheme will not answer a number of practical questions about how to actually create the annotations, progressing from raw linguistic data to annotated linguistic artifacts that can be used to answer interesting questions or do interesting things. Annotation, especially high-quality annotation of large language datasets, can be a complex process potentially involving many people, stages, and tools, and the scheme only specifies the conceptual content of the annotation. By way of example, the following questions are relevant to a text annotation project and are not answered by a scheme:  How should linguistic artifacts be prepared? Will the originals be annotated directly, or will their textual content be extracted into separate files for annotation? In the latter case, what layout or formatting will be kept (lines, paragraphs page breaks, section headings, highlighted text)? What file format will be used? How will typographical errors be handled? Will typos be ignored, changed in the original, changed in extracted content, or encoded as an additional annotation? Who will be allowed to make corrections: the annotators themselves, adjudicators, or perhaps only the project manager?  How will annotators be provided artifacts to annotate? How will the order of annotation be specified (if at all), and how will this order be enforced? How will the project manager ensure that each document is annotated the appropriate number of times (e.g., by two different people for double annotation).  What inter-annotator agreement measures (IAAs) will be measured, and when? Will IAAs be measured continuously, on batches, or on other subsets of the corpus? How will their measurement at the right time be enforced? Will IAAs be used to track annotator training? If so, what level of IAA will be considered to indicate that training has succeeded? These questions are only a small selection of those that arise during the practical process of conducting annotation. The first goal of this chapter is to give an overview of the process of annotation from start to finish, pointing out these sorts of questions and subtasks for each stage. We will start with a known conceptual framework for the annotation process, the MATTER framework (Pustejovsky & Stubbs, 2013) and expand upon it. Our expanded framework is not guaranteed to be complete, but it will give a reader a very strong flavor of the kind of issues that arise so that they can start to anticipate them in the design of their own annotation project. The second goal is to explore the capabilities required by annotation tools. Tool support is central to effecting high quality, reusable annotations with low cost. The focus will be on identifying capabilities that are necessary or useful for annotation tools. Again, this list will not be exhaustive but it will be fairly representative, as the majority of it was generated by surveying a number of annotation experts about their opinions of available tools. Also listed are common problems that reduce tool utility (gathered during the same survey). Although specific examples of tools will be provided in many cases, the focus will be on more abstract capabilities and problems because new tools appear all the time while old tools disappear into disuse or disrepair. Before beginning, it is well to first introduce a few terms. By linguistic artifact, or just artifact, we mean the object to which annotations are being applied. These could be newspaper articles, web pages, novels, poems, TV 2 Mark A. Finlayson and Tomaž Erjavec shows, radio broadcasts, images, movies, or something else that involves language being captured in a semipermanent form. When we use the term document we will generally mean textual linguistic artifacts such as books, articles, transcripts, and the like. By annotation scheme, or just scheme, we follow the terminology as given in the early chapters of this volume, where a scheme comprises a linguistic theory, a derived model of a phenomenon of interest, a specification that defines the actual physical format of the annotation, and the guidelines that explain to an annotator how to apply the specification to linguistic artifacts. (citation to Chapter III by Ide et al.) By computing platform, or just platform, we mean any computational system on which an annotation tool can be run; classically this has meant personal computers, either desktops or laptops, but recently the range of potential computing platforms has expanded dramatically, to include on the one hand things like web browsers and mobile devices, and, on the other, internet-connected annotation servers and service oriented architectures. Choice of computing platform is driven by many things, including the identity of the annotators and their level of sophistication. We will speak of the annotation process or just process within an annotation project. By process, we mean any procedure or activity, at any level of granularity, involved in the production of annotation. This potentially encompasses everything from generating the initial idea, applying the annotation to the artifacts, to archiving the annotated documents for distribution. Although traditionally not considered part of annotation per se, we might also include here writing academic papers about the results of the annotation, as these activities also sometimes require annotation-focused tool support. We will also speak of annotation tools. By tool we mean any piece of computer software that runs on a computing platform that can be used to implement or carry out a process in the annotation project. Classically conceived annotation tools include software such as the Alembic workbench, Callisto, or brat (Day et al., 1997; Day, McHenry, Kozierok, & Riek, 2004; Stenetorp et al., 2012), but tools can also include software like Microsoft Word or Excel, Apache Tomcat (to run web servers), Subversion or Git (for document revision control), or mobile applications (apps). Tools usually have user interfaces (UIs), but they are not always graphical, fully functional, or even all that helpful. There is a useful distinction between a tool and a component (also called an NLP component, or an NLP algorithm; in UIMA (Apache, 2014) called an annotator), which are pieces of software that are intended to be integrated as libraries into software and can often be strung together in annotation pipelines for applying automatic annotations to linguistic artifacts. Software like tokenizers, part of speech taggers, parsers (Manning et al., 2014), multiword expression detectors (Kulkarni & Finlayson, 2011) or coreference resolvers (Pradhan et al., 2011) are all components. Sometimes the distinction between a tool and a component is not especially clear cut, but it is a useful one nonetheless. The main reason a chapter like this one is needed is that there is no one tool that does everything. There are multiple stages and tasks within every annotation project, typically requiring some degree of customization, and no tool does it all. That is why one needs multiple tools in annotation, and why a detailed consideration of the tool capabilities and problems is needed. 2 Overview of the Annotation Process The first step in an annotation project is, naturally, defining the scheme, but many other tasks must be executed to go from an annotation scheme to an actual set of cleanly annotated files useful for other tasks. 2.1 MATTER & MAMA A good starting place for organizing our conception of the various stages of the process of annotation is the MATTER cycle, proposed by Pustejovsky & Stubbs (2013). This framework outlines six major stages to annotation, corresponding to each letter in the word, defined as follows: M = Model: In this stage, the first of the process, the project leaders set up the conceptual framework for the project. Subtasks may include:  Search background work to understand existing theories of the phenomena  Create or adopt an abstract model of the phenomenon  Define an annotation scheme based on the model Overview of Annotation Creation: Processes & Tools 3  Search libraries, the web, and online repositories for potential linguistic artifacts  Create corpus artifacts if appropriate artifacts do not exist  Measure overall characteristics of artifacts to ground estimates of representativeness and balance  Collect the artifacts on which the annotation will be performed  Track artifact licenses  Measure various statistics of the collected corpus  Choose an annotation specification language  Build an annotation specification that disti