ICE Annotation Tools
Akiva Quinn, Nick Porter · 1996
Abstract A key aspect of the International Corpus of English (ICE) is the detailed linguistic annotation it contains. Providing annotations for textual features, word classes, syntactic categories, and functions allows comparisons to be conducted along many axes. Transforming a raw input file into a properly annotated text can involve much work, so software tools have been developed to keep this effort to a minimum. This paper describes three programs produced by the Survey of English Usage for machine-assisted annotation. The Markup Assistant automates the insertion of textual markup, generating ICE markup symbols at a single key press and ensuring that markup symbols are closed. The ICE Tag Selection System automates the selection from the alternative word-class tags generated by an automatic word-class tagger. The ICE Syntactic Marking System automates the addition of syntactic markers to texts prior to parsing by an automatic parser. The ICE Syntactic Tree annotator complements automatic parsing by providing a graphical environment for the manual editing of syntactic analyses.