Annotation uncertainty in the context of grammatical change

Abstract

This paper elaborates on the notion of uncertainty in the context of annotation in large text corpora, specifically focusing on (but not limited to) historical languages. Such uncertainty might be due to inherent properties of the language, for example, linguistic ambiguity and overlapping categories of linguistic description, but could also be caused by a lack of annotation expertise. By examining annotation uncertainty in more detail, we identify the sources, deepen our understanding of the nature and different types of uncertainty encountered in daily annotation practice, and discuss practical implications of our theoretical findings. This paper can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the perspectives of the main scientific disciplines involved in corpus projects, linguistics and computer science, to develop a unified view and to highlight the potential synergies between these disciplines.