Collaborative Annotation and Visualization of Functional and Discourse Structures

Linguistic annotation is the process of adding additional notations to raw linguistic data for descriptive or analytical purposes. In the tagging of complex Chinese and multilingual linguistic data with a sophisticated linguistic framework, immediate visualization of the complex multi-layered functional and discourse structures is crucial for both speeding up the tagging process and reducing errors. The need for large-scale linguistically annotated corpora has made collaborative annotation increasingly essential, and existing annotation tools are inadequate to the task of providing assistance to annotators when dealing with complex linguistic structural information. In this paper we describe the design and development of a collaborative tool to extend existing annotation tools. The tool improves annotation efficiency and addresses certain difficulties in representing complex linguistic relations. Here, we adopt annotation based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Rhetorical Structure Theory to demonstrate the effectiveness of the interface built on such infrastructure.