The Halliday Centre Tagger: An Online Platform for Semi-automatic Text Annotation and Analysis

Abstract

This paper reports the latest development of The Halliday Centre Tagger (the Tagger), an online platform provided with semi-automatic features to facilitate text annotation and analysis. The Tagger is featured for its web-based architecture with all functionalities and file storage space provided online, and a theory-neutral design where users can define their own labels for annotating various kinds of linguistic information. The Tagger is currently optimized for text annotation of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), providing by default a pre-defined set of SFG grammatical features, and the function of automatic identification of process types for English verbs. Apart from annotation, the Tagger also offers the features of visualization and summarization to aid text analysis. The visualization feature combines and illustrates multi-dimensional layers of annotation in a unified way of presentation, while the summarization feature categorizes annotated entries according to different SFG systems, i.e., transitivity, theme, logical-semantic relations, etc. Such features help users identify grammatical patterns in an annotated text.

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