Welcome to the annotation project!
Welcome! Thank you for your interests in the annotation project. In this project, we will create a hand-annotated corpus (i.e., systematic collection of texts) of academic English written by both first- and second- language writers of English. You will be an annotator of the project as a research assistant (RA), and you will gain hands-on experiences in processes of annotating a linguistic corpus, or more broadly corpus-based and Natural Language Processing (NLP) research.
Project overview
What constitutes ‘good’ academic writing? You may think of a range of ways that makes an essay good. For instance, the essay makes a “good” argument; it has a “good” organization; it has “good” content, etc. Although these are all relevant aspects of “good” academic writing, linguists consider that one important aspect of good writing has to do with the way in which the author positions themselves in relation to other voices and possible alternative positions. In other words, in academic writing, the writer is expected to take appropriate “stances” on the subject matter, by “toning down” some of your claims and/or “proclaiming” the most important views. In this annotation project, we are going to annotate sentences taken from essays written by both L1 and L2 writers of English in terms of such stance-taking expressions in each sentence.
What is this document about?
- This document explains the framework for manual annotation of the corpus.
- We use the
engagement framework(Martin & White, 2005) in order to annotate lexico-grammatical features of stance-taking. - What is stance-taking (/expressions)?—It is elements in the discourse that express the writer’s levels of commitment to the idea presented in the writing. For example, a writer can add tentativeness to their idea by acknowledging that it is only one of the possible interpretations. Compare different versions of the same argument:
- The banks have been greedy. (Stated as if it is a fact)
- In my view, the banks have been greedy. (Presented as a personal view)
- A book I read recently said that the banks have been greedy. (Acknowledging a source)
- The ability to appropriately adjust the level of commitment to the idea is one of the important aspects of academic writing.
- In this project, we will annotate sentences taken from academic essays in terms of the lexico-grammatical features of stance-taking.
The Goals of the project
- To create a human-annotated corpus of academic English on stance-taking expressions.
- More specifically:
- To identify specific lexico-grammatical items that enact meanings of stance-taking (e.g.,
in my view,X said) - To identify specific meanings of stance-taking (we call this Engagement moves) for the identified lexico-grammar items.
- To identify specific lexico-grammatical items that enact meanings of stance-taking (e.g.,
Next step: Overview
Table of Content
The following is the table of content for the manual. The original deanonymized version of the manual has sidebars for annotators to navigate through the contents. This could not be implemented in this anonymized version for review.