TextAnnotator: A UIMA Based Tool for the Simultaneous and Collaborative Annotation of Texts

Giuseppe Abrami, Manuel Stoeckel, Alexander Mehler


Abstract
The annotation of texts and other material in the field of digital humanities and Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a common task of research projects. At the same time, the annotation of corpora is certainly the most time- and cost-intensive component in research projects and often requires a high level of expertise according to the research interest. However, for the annotation of texts, a wide range of tools is available, both for automatic and manual annotation. Since the automatic pre-processing methods are not error-free and there is an increasing demand for the generation of training data, also with regard to machine learning, suitable annotation tools are required. This paper defines criteria of flexibility and efficiency of complex annotations for the assessment of existing annotation tools. To extend this list of tools, the paper describes TextAnnotator, a browser-based, multi-annotation system, which has been developed to perform platform-independent multimodal annotations and annotate complex textual structures. The paper illustrates the current state of development of TextAnnotator and demonstrates its ability to evaluate annotation quality (inter-annotator agreement) at runtime. In addition, it will be shown how annotations of different users can be performed simultaneously and collaboratively on the same document from different platforms using UIMA as the basis for annotation.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.112
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
891–900
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.112
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giuseppe Abrami, Manuel Stoeckel, and Alexander Mehler. 2020. TextAnnotator: A UIMA Based Tool for the Simultaneous and Collaborative Annotation of Texts. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 891–900, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
TextAnnotator: A UIMA Based Tool for the Simultaneous and Collaborative Annotation of Texts (Abrami et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.112.pdf