ANAWIKI: Creating Anaphorically Annotated Resources through Web Cooperation

The ability to make progress in Computational Linguistics depends on the availability of large annotated corpora, but creating such corpora by hand annotation is very expensive and time consuming; in practice, it is unfeasible to think of annotating more than one million words. However, the success of Wikipedia, the ESP game, and other projects shows that another approach might be possible: collaborative resource creation through the voluntary participation of thousands of Web users. ANAWIKI is a recently started project that will develop tools to allow and encourage large numbers of volunteers over the Web to collaborate in the creation of annotated corpora (in the first instance, of a corpus annotated with semantic information about anaphoric relations) through a variety of interfaces.