Report on the 2015 NSF Workshop on Unified Annotation Tooling

Abstract

On March 30 & 31, 2015, an international group of twenty-three researchers with expertise in linguistic annotation convened in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida to discuss problems with and potential solutions for the state of linguistic annotation tooling. The participants comprised 14 researchers from the U.S. and 9 from outside the U.S., with 7 countries and 4 continents represented, and hailed from fields and specialties including computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, speech processing, multi-modal data processing, clinical & medical natural language processing, linguistics, documentary linguistics, sign-language linguistics, corpus linguistics, and the digital humanities. The motivating problem of the workshop was the balkanization of annotation tooling, namely, that even though linguistic annotation requires sophisticated tool support to efficiently generate high-quality data, the landscape of tools for the field is fractured, incompatible, inconsistent, and lacks key capabilities. The overall goal of the workshop was to chart the way forward, centering on five key questions: (1) What are the problems with current tool landscape? (2) What are the possible benefits of solving some or all of these problems? (3) What capabilities are most needed? (4) How should we go about implementing these capabilities? And, (5) How should we ensure longevity and sustainability of the solution? I surveyed the participants before their arrival, which provided significant raw material for ideas, and the workshop discussion itself resulted in identification of ten specific classes of problems, five sets of most-needed capabilities. Importantly, we identified annotation project managers in computational linguistics as the key recipients and users of any solution, thereby succinctly addressing questions about the scope and audience of potential solutions. We discussed management and sustainability of potential solutions at length. The participants agreed on sixteen recommendations for future work. This technical report contains a detailed discussion of all these topics, a point-by-point review of the discussion in the workshop as it unfolded, detailed information on the participants and their expertise, and the summarized data from the surveys.