ANNALIST: ANNotation ALIgnment and Scoring Tool

In this paper we describe ANNALIST (Annotation, Alignment and Scoring Tool), a scoring system for the evaluation of the output of semantic annotation systems. ANNALIST has been designed as a system that is easily extensible and configurable for different domains, data formats, and evaluation tasks. The system architecture enables data input via the use of plugins and the users can access the system’s internal alignment and scoring mechanisms without the need to convert their data to a specified format. Although developed for evaluation tasks that involve the scoring of entity mentions and relations primarily, ANNALIST’s generic object representation and the availability of a range of criteria for the comparison of annotations enable the system to be tailored to a variety of scoring jobs. The paper reports on results from using ANNALIST in real-world situations in comparison to other scorers which are more established in the literature. ANNALIST has been used extensively for evaluation tasks within the VIKEF (EU FP6) and CLEF (UK MRC) projects. 1