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A Web-based System for Crowd-in-the-Loop Dependency Treebanking

Treebanks exist for many different languages, but they are often quite limited in terms of size, genre, and topic coverage. It is difficult to expand these treebanks or to develop new ones in part because manual annotation is time-consuming and expensive. Human-in-the-loop methods that leverage machine learning algorithms during the annotation process are one set of techniques that could be employed to accelerate annotation of large numbers of sentences. Additionally, crowdsourcing could be used to hire a large number of annotators at relatively low cost. Currently, there are few treebanking tools available that support either human-in-the-loop methods or crowdsourcing. To address this, we introduce CrowdTree , a web-based interactive tool for editing dependency trees. In addition to the visual frontend, the system has a Java servlet that can train a parsing model during the annotation process. This parsing model can then be applied to sentences as they are requested by annotators so that, instead of annotating sentences from scratch, annotators need only to edit the model’s predictions, potentially resulting in significant time savings. Multiple annotators can work simultaneously, and the system is even designed to be compatible with Mechanical Turk. Thus, CrowdTree supports not simply human-in-the-loop treebanking, but crowd-in-the-loop treebanking.