Automatic Annotation Suggestions and Custom Annotation Layers in WebAnno

In this paper, we present a flexible approach to the efficient and exhaustive manual annotation of text documents. For this purpose, we extend WebAnno (Yimam et al., 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.