TIARA: A Tool for Annotating Discourse Relations and Sentence Reordering

This paper introduces TIARA, a new publicly available web-based annotation tool for discourse relations and sentence reordering. Annotation tasks such as these, which are based on relations between large textual objects, are inherently hard to visualise without either cluttering the display and/or confusing the annotators. TIARA deals with the visual complexity during the annotation process by systematically simplifying the layout, and by offering interactive visualisation, including coloured links, indentation, and dual-view. TIARA's text view allows annotators to focus on the analysis of logical sequencing between sentences. A separate tree view allows them to review their analysis in terms of the overall discourse structure. The dual-view gives it an edge over other discourse annotation tools and makes it particularly attractive as an educational tool (e.g., for teaching students how to argue more effectively). As it is based on standard web technologies and can be easily customised to other annotation schemes, it can be easily used by anybody. Apart from the project it was originally designed for, in which hundreds of texts were annotated by three annotators, TIARA has already been adopted by a second discourse annotation study, which uses it in the teaching of argumentation.