SLATE: A Super-Lightweight Annotation Tool for Experts
This tool addresses the need for a lightweight, terminal-based annotation interface for experts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation concepts with a new interface.
The paper tackles the problem of annotation tools being GUI-based and cumbersome to install by introducing SLATE, a super-lightweight terminal-based tool that supports various annotation scales and types. In a user study, it was consistently the easiest to install and use, and it has been applied to annotate corpora, including one involving over 250 hours of effort.
Many annotation tools have been developed, covering a wide variety of tasks and providing features like user management, pre-processing, and automatic labeling. However, all of these tools use Graphical User Interfaces, and often require substantial effort to install and configure. This paper presents a new annotation tool that is designed to fill the niche of a lightweight interface for users with a terminal-based workflow. Slate supports annotation at different scales (spans of characters, tokens, and lines, or a document) and of different types (free text, labels, and links), with easily customisable keybindings, and unicode support. In a user study comparing with other tools it was consistently the easiest to install and use. Slate fills a need not met by existing systems, and has already been used to annotate two corpora, one of which involved over 250 hours of annotation effort.