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Towards a Useful Chinese Annotation Tool: An Examination of Annotators’ Practice and Needs

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Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity (iConference 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13972))

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Abstract

With the rapid development of digital humanities research and the digitization of ancient Chinese books, annotation has become a critical pre-processing activity to extract information for quantitative analysis and to prepare training corpus for natural language processing models. Since manual annotation is a repetitive and time-consuming task that occupies the majority of humanities scholars’ time, humanities scholars are looking for tools to facilitate annotation. However, existing tools cannot fulfill the annotation needs of humanities scholars. Few studies have investigated current annotation practices and requirements of humanities scholars, not to mention Chinese annotators. This paper explores Chinese humanities scholars’ annotation practice, needs, and expectations of annotation tools based on interviews with 12 participants from different humanities disciplines. The interview transcripts are coded in three steps: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Six main categories are identified. We described the analysis results of three categories: annotation practice, feature requirements, and user experience. We further discussed the design implications and requirements of the research environment and the limitations of the work and future work.

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Acknowledgment

The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72010107003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Wenqi Li & Jun Wang

  2. Research Center for Digital Humanities, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Wenqi Li, Tzu-Yi Ho & Jun Wang

Authors
  1. Wenqi Li
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  2. Tzu-Yi Ho
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  3. Jun Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. iSchool Organization, Berlin, Germany

    Isaac Sserwanga

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Anne Goulding

  3. University of Missouri, Chicago, IL, USA

    Heather Moulaison-Sandy

  4. University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Jia Tina Du

  5. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    António Lucas Soares

  6. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Viviane Hessami

  7. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Rebecca D. Frank

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Li, W., Ho, TY., Wang, J. (2023). Towards a Useful Chinese Annotation Tool: An Examination of Annotators’ Practice and Needs. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13972. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28031-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28032-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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