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

计算机语言处理的发展是国家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，每年手工处理成千上万的文本，包括数十万个单词，为训练计算机算法提供数据。这种注释耗时、昂贵且困难，并且受到一个长期存在的问题的阻碍：缺乏统一的、专门的软件工具来协助注释和注释管理。麻省理工学院的研究人员设想创建一种新的软件基础设施，称为统一注释工作台（UAW），这是解决这个问题的现成方案。UAW将显著提高花在注释上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进行注释类工作的科学和工程领域受益。作为一个小的选择，这包括人机交互，认知科学，认知心理学，社会学，精神病学，以及任何与数字人文学科相关的领域。计算语言学和统计自然语言处理（NLP）在科学和技术上都是重要的研究领域。这些领域的进步是由对分析语言数据以完成信息处理任务的普遍渴望所推动的。大型带注释的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认可，但该领域仍存在一个主要缺陷：没有现成的、通用的、统一的工具来执行文本注释。面对这种缺乏，许多语言研究人员以巨大的代价从零开始创建自己的工具。这些工具通常是仓促设计的，不是为一般用途而发布的，不是维护的，并且通常是由其他人实现的功能的冗余。由于研究人员放弃了在工具设计中存在太多困难的项目，这导致了机会的丧失；它降低了研究人员建立和复制他人的能力。S工作，作为基础设施的关键部分是不可用的；这种重复的工作是对资源的巨大浪费。在这个基础设施规划项目中，MIT团队将采取三个步骤来实现统一注释工作台（UAW）：一个通用的、统一的、现成的基础设施来支持语料库注释。首先，他们将全面回顾最新的注释工具。其次，他们将为UAW识别潜在的实现技术，并创建软件模型。第三，他们将组织一个研讨会，让注释社区参与到UAW的最佳形式中来。

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.