CI-P: Toward Unified Tool Support for Linguistic Corpus Annotation

语言计算机处理的发展是国家自然科学基金资助的一项关键科学技术能力。为了支持这些努力，每年都会对包括数十万个单词的数千篇文本进行手工处理，以提供数据来训练计算机算法。这种批注既费时又费钱，而且有一个长期存在的问题阻碍了它：缺乏统一的、专门的软件工具来协助批注和批注管理。麻省理工学院的研究人员设想创建一个新的软件基础设施，称为统一注释工作台(UAW)，这是这个问题的现成解决方案。UAW将显著提高在注释上花费的每一美元的有效性。重要的是，UAW不仅对语言注释社区有用，它还将使许多依赖于人们从事注释类工作的科学和工程领域受益。作为一个小范围的选择，这包括人机交互，认知科学，认知心理学，社会学，精神病学，以及与数字人文相关的任何领域。计算语言学和统计自然语言处理(NLP)是科学和技术上的重要研究领域。人们普遍渴望为信息处理任务分析语言数据，从而推动了这些领域的进展。大型注释语料库是实现这些进步的关键资源。但是，尽管标注语料库的重要性得到了广泛的认可，但该领域仍然存在一个重大缺陷：没有现成的、通用的、统一的工具来执行文本标注。面对这一不足，许多语言研究人员从头开始开发自己的工具，成本很高。这些工具通常是仓促设计的，不是发布供一般使用的，不是维护的，而且通常是冗余的，有其他人实现的功能。这导致了机会的丧失，因为研究人员放弃了在工具设计中存在太多困难的项目；它降低了研究人员在其他S工作的基础上进行构建和复制的能力，因为基础设施的关键部分不可用；并且这种重复工作是对资源的严重浪费。在这个基础设施规划项目中，麻省理工学院团队将分三步实现统一标注工作台(UAW)：支持语料库标注的通用、统一、现成的基础设施。首先，他们将全面回顾注释工具的最新发展。其次，他们将确定UAW的潜在实施技术，并创建软件模型。第三，他们将组织一次研讨会，让注释界参与UAW的最佳形式。

Development of the computer processing of language is a key scientific and technological capability that is funded by the NSF. In support of these efforts, thousands of texts, comprising hundreds of thousands of words, are hand-processed every year to provide data to train computer algorithms. This annotation is time-consuming, expensive, and difficult, and it is hampered by a long-standing problem: the lack of unified, specialized software tools to assist in annotation and annotation management. Researchers at MIT envision creating a new software infrastructure, called a Unified Annotation Workbench (UAW), that is an off-the-shelf solution to this problem. A UAW will significantly the effectiveness of every dollar spent on annotation. Importantly, a UAW will be useful not only to linguistic annotation community: it will also benefit many scientific and engineering fields that depend on people to annotation-like work. As a small selection, this includes human-computer interaction, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, sociology, psychiatry, and any field related to the digital humanities.Computational linguistics and statistical natural language processing (NLP) are important areas of study, both scientifically and technologically. Advances in these fields are fed by a universal hunger for the analysis of language data for information processing tasks. Large annotated corpora are a key resource that enables these advances. But despite the widely-recognized importance of annotated corpora, the field has a major lack: there is no off-the-shelf, general, unified tool for performing text annotation. Faced with this lack, many language researchers create their own tools from scratch, at significant cost. These tools are usually hastily designed, not released for general use, not maintained, and often redundant with capabilities implemented by others. This leads to lost opportunities, as researchers forego projects that present too many difficulties in tool design; it reduces the ability of researchers to build upon and replicate other?s work, as a critical part of the infrastructure is not available; and this duplication of effort represents a significant waste of resources. In this infrastructure planning project, the MIT team will take three steps toward a Unified Annotation Workbench (UAW): a general, unified, off-the-shelf infrastructure to support corpus annotation. First, they will comprehensively review the state-of-the-art of annotation tools. Second, they will identify potential implementation technologies for a UAW and create software mockups. Third, they will organize a workshop to engage the annotation community as to the best form of a UAW.