What I’ve learned about annotating informal text (and why you shouldn’t take my word for it)
Nathan Schneider · 2015
In conjunction with this year’s LAW theme, “Syntactic Annotation of Non-canonical Language” (NCL), I have been asked to weigh in on several important questions faced by anyone wishing to create annotated resources of NCLs. My experience with syntactic annotation of noncanonical language falls under an effort undertaken at Carnegie Mellon University with the aim of building an NLP pipeline for syntactic analysis of Twitter text. We designed a linguistically-grounded annotation scheme, applied it to tweets, and then trained statistical analyzers—first for part-of-speech (POS) tags (Gimpel et al., 2011; Owoputi et al., 2012), then for parses (Schneider et al., 2013; Kong et al., 2014). I will review some of the salient points from this work in addressing the broader questions about annotation methodology.