Interacting with Text Annotations: PACTE Platform as a Research and Learning Tool

Text annotation is a necessary activity in many domains nowadays: researchers use it to identify relevant information, analyze the language level used, link related information to identified concepts, search for linguistic... [ view full abstract ]

Text annotation is a necessary activity in many domains nowadays: researchers use it to identify relevant information, analyze the language level used, link related information to identified concepts, search for linguistic patterns in specialized corpora, enrich texts with new knowledge, create datasets for natural language processing tasks and so on. Teachers can also use text annotations to mark certain sections of a document as important to their student, but can also use them as answers for use-case analysis, critical study of a specialized text or in any way to assess students’ comprehension level. Defining, creating, sharing and managing text annotations for these tasks as either researcher or teacher is challenging because of the lack of available tools.

The Computer Research Institute of Montreal has developed for the past two years an online platform to provide tools for such tasks. This platform, called PACTE (http://pacte.crim.ca), offers researchers and teachers online tools to manage users, annotation schemas, small or large text corpora, lexical resources and collaborative annotation tasks. Programming-inclined research groups or IT departments can also interact with the platform’s secured REST api to upload, download and manipulate annotations and resources, manage user accounts and so on.

The presentation will cover the high-level capabilities and technological aspects of PACTE as well as how it can be used in research or teaching settings. A specialized use case will be demonstrated for each setting, one simulating a text analysis homework and another relating an ongoing machine-learning research project in criminology for young offenders.