UMR -Writer: A Web Application for Annotating Uniform Meaning Representations (2021)

Abstract: We present UMR-Writer, a web-based application for annotating Uniform Meaning Representations (UMR), a graph-based, cross-linguistically applicable semantic representation developed recently to support the development of interpretable natural language applications that require deep semantic analysis of texts. We present the functionalities of UMR-Writer and discuss the challenges in developing such a tool and how they are addressed.

## related work fundamentally, umr is a representation based on relations between concepts, and there are a number of tools that support annotation for relations. some examples include anafora @xcite , mae @xcite , webanno (eckart de @xcite , and brat @xcite . anafora is a web-based tool that supports the annotation of relations between text spans. mae is a standalone tool that offers flexible and versatile schema support for complex relation sets. webanno supports semantic role labelling or event annotations, and it enables the annotation of semantic structures and the handling of rich semantic tagsets. brat provides intuitive annotation visualization to help users understand the relations between text annotations. however, all of these tools only support annotation based on text spans, and not annotation that requires transforming word tokens in the source text into concepts in the annotated graph that take the form of (sensedisambiguated) word lemmas, concatenated words, or even abstract concepts that do not correspond to any specific word token in the source text. in contrast, umr-writer allows the creation of concepts that are transformations from word tokens in the source text or purely new additions. amr editor @xcite is a tool created for amr annotation and is most similar to umr-writer. like umr-writer, it also supports the annotation of concepts that are different from word tokens in the source text. it also makes use of both closed sets of abstract concepts and relations as well as open-class lexicons. however, it offers limited support for languages other than english, and does not support document-level annotation. ## future development it would also be useful for umr-writer to be made inter-operable with other platforms. for example, flex, used by many field linguists for language documentation, offers a convenient way of storing texts, providing morphological glosses, and linking these to the lexicon. efforts will be made to integrate and work more seamlessly with such common field linguist tools. we also plan to make umr-writer support more languages. we will continue to improve the tool to promote annotation efficiency and consistency as ease of use as we receive feedback for users.