Survey of Tools for Manual Linguistic Annotation: Supporting Diversity through Interactive Exploration

Abstract

Manual annotation tools are core infrastructure for corpus creation, enabling the development of linguistically informed language resources relevant for both linguistic discovery and computational applications. We present a comprehensive survey of 21 tools supporting morphosyntactic and multi-word expression annotation, systematically documenting more than 50 features relevant for annotation workflows—from software architecture and usability to linguistic coverage and annotation scope. The survey results are published as an open dataset and made accessible through an interactive online platform that allows users to filter and compare tools according to their specific needs. Our initial analysis highlights a robust and open ecosystem of annotation tools, but advanced needs for complex and language-independent annotation are inconsistently addressed.

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