This paper introduces a new web-based software tool for annotating text, Text Annotation Graphs, or TAG. It provides functionality for representing complex relationships between words and word phrases that are not available in other software tools, including the ability to define and visualize relationships between the relationships themselves (semantic hypergraphs). Additionally, we include an approach to representing text annotations in which annotation subgraphs, or semantic summaries, are used to show relationships outside of the sequential context of the text itself. Users can use these subgraphs to quickly find similar structures within the current document or external annotated documents. Initially, TAG was developed to support information extraction tasks on a large database of biomedical articles. However, our software is flexible enough to support a wide range of annotation tasks for any domain. Examples are provided that showcase TAG's capabilities on morphological parsing and event extraction tasks.
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. In this paper, we present a flexible approach to the efficient and exhaustive manual annotation of text documents. For this purpose, we extend WebAnno (, 2013) an open-source web-based annotation tool. 1 While it was previously limited to specific annotation layers, our extension allows adding and configuring an arbitrary number of layers through a web-based UI. These layers can be annotated separately or simultaneously, and support most types of linguistic annotations such as spans, semantic classes, dependency relations, lexical chains, and morphology. Further, we tightly integrate a generic machine learning component for automatic annotation suggestions of span annotations. In two case studies, we show that automatic annotation suggestions, combined with our split-pane UI concept, significantly reduces annotation time.