Platforms for Non-Speakers annotating names in any language

Abstract

We demonstrate two annotation platforms that allow an English speaker to annotate names for any language without knowing the language. These platforms provided high-quality "silver standard" annotations for low-resource language name taggers (Zhang et al., 2017) that achieved state-of-the-art performance on two surprise languages (Oromo and Tigrinya) at LoreHLT20171 and ten languages at TACKBP EDL2017 (Ji et al., 2017). We discuss strengths and limitations and compare other methods of creating silver- and goldstandard annotations using native speakers. We will make our tools publicly available for research use.