IMI - A multilingual semantic annotation environment

Abstract

Semantic annotated parallel corpora, though rare, play an increasingly important role in natural language processing. These corpora provide valuable data for computational tasks like sense-based machine translation and word sense disambiguation, but also to contrastive linguistics and translation studies. In this paper we present the ongoing development of a web-based corpus semantic annotation environment that uses the Open Multilingual Wordnet (Bond and Foster, 2013) as a sense inventory. The system includes interfaces to help coordinating the annotation project and a corpus browsing interface designed specifically to meet the needs of a semantically annotated corpus. The tool was designed to build the NTU-Multilingual Corpus (Tan and Bond, 2012). For the past six years, our tools have been tested and developed in parallel with the semantic annotation of a portion of this corpus in Chinese, English, Japanese and Indonesian. The annotation system is released under an open source license (MIT).