SLATE: A Super-Lightweight Annotation Tool for Experts

Jonathan K. Kummerfeld


Abstract
Many annotation tools have been developed, covering a wide variety of tasks and providing features like user management, pre-processing, and automatic labeling. However, all of these tools use Graphical User Interfaces, and often require substantial effort to install and configure. This paper presents a new annotation tool that is designed to fill the niche of a lightweight interface for users with a terminal-based workflow. SLATE supports annotation at different scales (spans of characters, tokens, and lines, or a document) and of different types (free text, labels, and links), with easily customisable keybindings, and unicode support. In a user study comparing with other tools it was consistently the easiest to install and use. SLATE fills a need not met by existing systems, and has already been used to annotate two corpora, one of which involved over 250 hours of annotation effort.
Anthology ID:
P19-3002
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Marta R. Costa-jussà, Enrique Alfonseca
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–12
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-3002
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-3002
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan K. Kummerfeld. 2019. SLATE: A Super-Lightweight Annotation Tool for Experts. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 7–12, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SLATE: A Super-Lightweight Annotation Tool for Experts (Kummerfeld, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-3002.pdf
Note:
 P19-3002.Note.pdf
Code
 jkkummerfeld/slate