WebAnno: A flexible, web-based and visually supported system for distributed annotations

We present WebAnno, a general pur-pose web-based annotation tool for a wide range of linguistic annotations. Web-Anno offers annotation project manage-ment, freely configurable tagsets and the management of users in different roles. WebAnno uses modern web technology for visualizing and editing annotations in a web browser. It supports arbitrarily large documents, pluggable import/export filters, the curation of annotations across various users, and an interface to farming out annotations to a crowdsourcing plat-form. Currently WebAnno allows part-of-speech, named entity, dependency parsing and co-reference chain annotations. The architecture design allows adding addi-tional modes of visualization and editing, when new kinds of annotations are to be supported.