A Web-based Tool for the Integrated Annotation of Semantic and Syntactic Structures

TLDR

The authors present the third major release of WebAnno, a generic web‑based annotation tool for distributed teams, and describe its application in a German semantic‑role annotation project. New features include semantic‑role and event annotation support, tight integration of semantic and syntactic annotations via slot features—a constraint mechanism—and a redesigned user interface, all developed and tested in the German project. A comparative evaluation demonstrates that the new release achieves significant speedups over WebAnno 2 for semantic annotation tasks.

Abstract

We introduce the third major release of WebAnno, a generic web-based annotation tool for distributed teams. New features in this release focus on semantic annotation tasks (e.g. semantic role labelling or event annotation) and allow the tight integration of semantic annotations with syntactic annotations. In particular, we introduce the concept of slot features, a novel constraint mechanism that allows modelling the interaction between semantic and syntactic annotations, as well as a new annotation user interface. The new features were developed and used in an annotation project for semantic roles on German texts. The paper briefly introduces this project and reports on experiences performing annotations with the new tool. On a comparative evaluation, our tool reaches significant speedups over WebAnno 2 for a semantic annotation task.