ALANNO: An Active Learning Annotation System for Mortals

TL;DR

ALANNO is an open-source active learning annotation system designed for NLP tasks, addressing practical challenges in real-world annotation projects by supporting multi-annotator management and configurable AL methods.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, extensible annotation platform that enhances active learning effectiveness in practical NLP annotation scenarios.

Findings

Supports multiple AL methods and models

Facilitates multi-annotator management

Enhances annotation efficiency and effectiveness

Abstract

Supervised machine learning has become the cornerstone of today's data-driven society, increasing the need for labeled data. However, the process of acquiring labels is often expensive and tedious. One possible remedy is to use active learning (AL) -- a special family of machine learning algorithms designed to reduce labeling costs. Although AL has been successful in practice, a number of practical challenges hinder its effectiveness and are often overlooked in existing AL annotation tools. To address these challenges, we developed ALANNO, an open-source annotation system for NLP tasks equipped with features to make AL effective in real-world annotation projects. ALANNO facilitates annotation management in a multi-annotator setup and supports a variety of AL methods and underlying models, which are easily configurable and extensible.