Survey of Tools for Manual Linguistic Annotation: Supporting Diversity through Interactive Exploration

Ludovica Pannitto, Kaja Dobrovoljc Zor, Bruno Guillaume


Abstract
Manual annotation tools are core infrastructure for corpus creation, enabling the development of linguistically informed language resources relevant for both linguistic discovery and computational applications. We present a comprehensive survey of 21 tools supporting morphosyntactic and multi-word expression annotation, systematically documenting more than 50 features relevant for annotation workflows—from software architecture and usability to linguistic coverage and annotation scope. The survey results are published as an open dataset and made accessible through an interactive online platform that allows users to filter and compare tools according to their specific needs. Our initial analysis highlights a robust and open ecosystem of annotation tools, but advanced needs for complex and language-independent annotation are inconsistently addressed.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.905
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
11562–11573
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.905/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ludovica Pannitto, Kaja Dobrovoljc Zor, and Bruno Guillaume. 2026. Survey of Tools for Manual Linguistic Annotation: Supporting Diversity through Interactive Exploration. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:11562–11573.
Cite (Informal):
Survey of Tools for Manual Linguistic Annotation: Supporting Diversity through Interactive Exploration (Pannitto et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.905.pdf