Web-based Annotation Interface for Derivational Morphology (2022)

Abstract: The paper presents a visual interface for manual annotation of language resources for derivational morphology. The interface is web-based and created using relatively simple programming techniques, and yet it rapidly facilitates and speeds up the annotation process, especially in languages with rich derivational morphology. As such, it can reduce the cost of the process. After introducing manual annotation tasks in derivational morphology, the paper describes the new visual interface and a case study that compares the current annotation method to the annotation using the interface. In addition, it also demonstrates the opportunity to use the interface for manual annotation of syntactic trees. The source codes are freely available under the MIT License on GitHub.

## introduction making manual annotations is a common task when a high-quality language resource is created. the more complex the annotation task, the more time consuming it is for an annotator, an expert in a linguistic field captured by the resource. consequently, the cost of creating such resource can be high. the simplest approach is to simplify the task; however, it is not possible in many cases. this paper presents such task and how to approach it in the field of annotating language resources of derivational morphology. when annotating derivational data, annotators must make many decisions at once. this complexity leads not only to the prolongation of the annotation process but also to mistakes that must be additionally re-annotated. as the simplification of these decisions is out of the question, a freely available web-based visual interface has been created to make the annotation process easier for annotators. the fact that annotating derivational morphology using the interface is faster than the currently used annotation method is also validated by real annotators. read reading reader readable readability readableness readably the paper is structured as follows. section 2 describes the current state of annotating derivational morphology. section 3 focuses on the new interface as well as its applicability to other annotation tasks. section 4 provide a comparison of the current annotation method versus the utilisation of the interface. section 5 concludes the paper. ## interface for manual annotations the new interface should visualise the annotated data (cf. figure 2 ) and allow annotators to edit it, leading to the facilitation of the annotation process. in this case, the process should lead to the data of derivational morphology annotated into the tree-shaped structure presented in section 2.1. the functionality and design of the interface have already been tested by real annotators. they provided feedback for re-designing the interface to the current state, see figure 3 . validation of the interface is presented in section 4. the development of such tools however never ends, as many things can be still improved. therefore, the interface is distributed as open-source (on github) 11 with a detailed manual that includes also example data. it is possible to run the interface both locally and online. 12 ## human validation to validate the usefulness of the newly created interface for manual annotation of derivational morphology, as described in the section 2.3, a simple annotation experiment has been done with human annotators. two methods of manual annotation are compared: (a) the currently used method when annotators work in the traditional text processor with the .tsv format, and (b) the annotation by using the newly created visual interface with the .json format. the main expectation is that annotating the same data by using the interface should be faster. the individual parts of this experiment, such as the input sample as well as the annotated ones, are stored on the github repository with the source codes. ## conclusion when developing high-quality data, especially data that contains more complicated structures, developers often ask for manual annotations. they need the annotations when they create, extend, test, or evaluate the data. annotation of complex phenomena is time-consuming and increases data production costs. therefore, it seems worth spending time to simplify the annotation process. in this paper, a case study about manual annotation of complex phenomena from derivational morphology has been presented. as a way of simplifying the annotation process, a web-based visual annotation interface in which annotators can edit the displayed data has been created. the interface is freely available (cf. footnote 11). it was created in direct collaboration with several annotators who tested the interface on data of real derivational families and provided useful feedback. the annotators have also rated the annotation process with the created interface as more attractive, easier, and faster, which led to greater savings of time (and potentially money spent on the development of the resulting resource while still achieving high quality). their feedback has led to the addition of several new functionalities, such as keyboard shortcuts and the button for checking treeness, that significantly speed up the annotation process. in addition, the desired benefits of the interface have been validated by annotators, and the paper describes this validation. it confirms that usage of the new interface rapidly speeds up the annotation process compared to the current method of annotating data for derivational morphology. in general, this paper underlines that a tool/interface can be created by relatively basic techniques but can still save a lot of annotators' time and effort. one of the crucial points is, however, to be open-minded and to communicate with annotators. since the annotators know how they must think during the annotating, they can specify their needs and provide informed feedback. there is still (and always will be) a lot of ways in which such interface can be improved or extended; they remain for future work. the important message is that even a simple interface can greatly facilitate the manual annotation process. while a programmer creates such interface in a few hours, annotators can save days of work.