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Chooser: a Multi-Task Annotation Tool

The paper presents a tool assisting manual annotation of linguistic data developed at the Department of Computational linguistics, IBL-BAS. Chooser is a general-purpose modular application for corpus annotation based on the principles of commonality and reusability of the created resources, language and theory independence, extendibility and user-friendliness. These features have been achieved through a powerful abstract architecture within the Model-View-Controller paradigm that is easily tailored to task-specific requirements and readily extendable to new applications. The tool is to a considerable extent independent of data format and representation and produces outputs that are largely consistent with existing standards. The annotated data are therefore reusable in tasks requiring different levels of annotation and are accessible to external applications. The tool incorporates edit functions, pass and arrangement strategies that facilitate annotators’ work. The relevant module produces tree-structured and graph-based representations in respective annotation modes. Another valuable feature of the application is concurrent access by multiple users and centralised storage of lexical resources underlying annotation schemata, as well as of annotations, including frequency of selection, updates in the lexical database, etc. Chooser has been successfully applied to a number of tasks: POS tagging, WS and syntactic annotation.