An environment for relational annotation of political debates

Abstract

This paper describes the MARDY corpus annotation environment developed for a collaboration between political science and computational linguistics. The tool realizes the complete workflow necessary for annotating a large newspaper text collection with rich information about claims (demands) raised by politicians and other actors, including claim and actor spans, relations, and polarities. In addition to the annotation GUI, the tool supports the identification of relevant documents, text pre-processing, user management, integration of external knowledge bases, annotation comparison and merging, statistical analysis, and the incorporation of machine learning models as "pseudo-annotators".