Designing Annotation Tools based on Properties of Annotation Problems

The creation of richly annotated, extendable and reusable corpora of multimodal interactions is an expensive and time-consuming task. Support from tools to create annotations is indispensable. This paper argues that annotation tools should be focused on specific classes of annotation problems to make the annotation process more efficient. The central part of the paper discusses how the properties of an annotation problem influence the design of the specialized tools used to manually create the annotations. Two existing tools, developed at the University of Twente, are used as examples.