Influence of Text Type and Text Length on Anaphoric Annotation

We report the results of a study that investigates the agreement of anaphoric annotations. The study focuses on the influence of the factors text length and text type on a corpus of scientific articles and newspaper texts. In order to measure inter-annotator agreement we compare existing approaches and we propose to measure each step of the annotation process separately instead of measuring the resulting anaphoric relations only. A total amount of 3642 anaphoric relations has been annotated for a corpus of 53038 tokens (12327 markables). The results of the study show that text type has more influence on inter-annotator agreement than text length. Furthermore, the definition of well-defined annotation instructions and coder training is a crucial point in order to receive good annotation results.