Background Research

Now that you’ve considered what linguistic levels are appropriate for your task, it’s time to do some research into related work. Creating an annotated corpus can take a lot of effort, and while it’s possible to create a good annotation task completely on your own, checking the state of the industry can save you a lot of time and effort. Chances are there’s some research that’s relevant to what you’ve been doing, and it helps to not have to reinvent the wheel.

For example, if you are interested in temporal annotation, you know by now that ISO-TimeML is the ISO standard for time and event annotation, including temporal relationships. But this fact doesn’t require that all temporal annotations use the ISO-TimeML schema as-is. Different domains, such as medical and biomedical text analysis, have found that TimeML is a useful starting place, but in some cases provides too many options for annotators, or in other cases does not cover a particular case relevant to the area being explored. Looking at what other people have done with existing annotation schemes, particularly in fields related to those you are planning to annotate, can make your own annotation task....