Corpus Annotation through Crowdsourcing: Towards Best Practice Guidelines

Crowdsourcing is an emerging collaborative approach that can be used for the acquisition of annotated corpora and a wide range of other linguistic resources. Although the use of this approach is intensifying in all its key genres (paid-for crowdsourcing, games with a purpose, volunteering-based approaches), the community still lacks a set of best-practice guidelines similar to the annotation best practices for traditional, expert-based corpus acquisition. In this paper we focus on the use of crowdsourcing methods for corpus acquisition and propose a set of best practice guidelines based in our own experiences in this area and an overview of related literature. We also introduce GATE Crowd, a plugin of the GATE platform that relies on these guidelines and offers tool support for using crowdsourcing in a more principled and efficient manner.