A Semi-Automatic Word-Level Annotation and Transcription Tool for Spelling Error Categories

In order to train and evaluate tools for the automatic transcription of misspelled texts and automatic annotation of over 20 spelling error categories, it is important to create training data. A very large database of children’s freely written text was collected in the past and in this paper we describe the tool that we have developed in order to manually transcribe and annotate the data. The manual transcription comprises the reconstruction of the orthographically correct word sequence. Annotation is performed on a per-word basis with respect to committed (child spelling) and potential (correct word) spelling error categories. The tool supports human transcribers by suggesting automatically generated annotations. Consistent annotations are propagated and data is presented to the user in a sorted manner to minimize human effort. The tool has been implemented as a web application that makes use of PHP on the server side and a lightweight Java GUI on the client side. The annotated data is stored in a custom made XML schema.