From language community to individual and from individual researcher to team-based research

From individual researcher to team-based research

Annotation-based Corpus Linguistics

• Corpus Query
• Hits
• Filter False Positives
• Add linguistic annotation
• Quantitative Analysis

Problems

• Linkage problem
• Synchronization problem

Linkage problem

Typical workflow

Consequences

• Spread of non-reusable data

Synchronization problem

Two types of synchronization problems:

• Intrinsic: related to the linguistic annotation process itself
• Extrinsic: related to software synchronization challenges

Intrinsic

Unifying annotation schemes and their usage.

• Modification (introduction, removal or change) of labels.
• Interpretational disagreements: spotting & correcting.

Extrinsic

Fundamental problem of collaborative software/distributed systems.

“How to ensure that dispersed users are able to modify a shared body of documents without overwriting each other’s changes”

Application-based approach

• Bring modern web-app features to a corpus-query/annotation interface.

• Encompass Corpus Query Engine + Annotation Interface
• Enable synchronized real-time annotation of corpus material.

Architecture

Web-based Client

• Real-time feedback client-to-client following a Pub/Sub architecture.
• Subscribers are assigned roles with different permissions. (control access to resources)
• Conflicts are explicitely resolved and documented. (WIP)

Annotation Database

• Support for Token & Span annotations (see also RelANNIS, Ziggurat).
• Version controlled. Each annotation has a revision history.

Added advantages

• Structured annotation data:
  • What parts and to what extent can linguistic annotation be automated.
  • Incremental reindexing of the corpus + annotations.
• Reciprocal supervision (Am I using the categories as my peers do?)
• Decoupling of front-end and query-engine (swap engines).

Decoupling of Front-end and Query-engine