Problem-oriented tagging

Problem-oriented tagging (as described by de Haan (1984)) is the phenomenon whereby users will take a corpus, either already annotated, or unannotated, and add to it their own form of annotation, oriented particularly towards their own research goal. This differs in two ways from the other types of annotation we have examined in this session.

  1. It is not exhaustive. Not every word (or sentence) is tagged - only those which are directly relevant to the research. This is something which problem-oriented tagging has in common with anaphoric annotation.

  2. Annotation schemes are selected, not for broad coverage and theory-neutrality, but for the revelance of the distinctions which it makes to the specific questions that the researcher wishes to ask of his/her data.

Although it is difficult to generalise further about this form of corpus annotation, it is an important type to keep in mind in the context of practical research using corpora.

Part-of-speech annotation | Lemmatisation | Parsing
Semantics | Discoursal and text annotation
Phonetic annotation | Prosody