After logging in, you will see the main menu. Click on Projects to go to the project management page and there click on create to start a new project. Enter a name for your project, select the type annotation project and press save.

Next, switch to the Documents tab and press choose files to select a plain text file from your local harddisk (the file should be in UTF-8 encoding). As part of the import process, WebAnno automatically processes the file to identify sentence and token boundaries.

Use the Home link at the top of the screen to return to the main menu and select Annotation to open your text file in the annotation editor.

To create your first annotation, select Named entity from the Layer dropdown menu on the right side of the screen. Then, use the mouse to select a word in the Annotation area. When you release the mouse button, the annotation is immediately created and you can edit its details in the right sidebar.

Congratulations! You have created your first annotation project.

To familiarize yourself with the functionalities of WebAnno, try importing some of the WebAnno downloads page[example projects].

Running WebAnno in the way you just did is a great way to get started and try out its capabilities, but it is not the best way of working with the application. If you like WebAnno, please be sure to check out the Administrator Guide to learn how to set up a production-ready instance.

When navigating to the Annotation page, a dialogue opens that allows you to select a project, and a document within the project. If you want to open a different project or document later, click on Open to open the dialog.

Projects appear as folders, and contain the documents of the project. Double-click on a document to open it for annotation. Document names written in black show that the document has not been opened by the current user, blue font means that it has already been opened, whereas red font indicates that the document has already been marked as done.

Users that are managers can additionally open other users' documents to view their annotations but cannot change them. This is done by selecting the project, user and then document in the described dialogue. The user’s own name is listed at the top and marked (me).

Sentence numbers on the left side of the annotation page show the exact sentence numbers in the document.

The arrow buttons first page, next page, previous page, last page, and go to page allow you to navigate accordingly. The Prev. and Next buttons in the Document frame allow you to go to the previous or next document on your project list. You can also use the following keyboard assignments in order to navigate only using your keyboard.

A click on the Help button displays the Guidelines for the tool and The Annotator’s Guide to NER-Annotation. When you are finished with annotating or curating a document, please click on the Done button, so that the document may be further processed. If the button above the Done is a cross symbol, it means the documents have already been finished. If the symbol has a tick, it is still open.

Annotation of spans works by selecting the span, or double-clicking on a word. This activates the Actions-box on the right, where you can choose a layer. One can also type in the initial letters and chose the needed layer. After having chosen a layer, the drop-down menu inside the Features-box displays the features you can use during the annotation. The tag can be selected out of the drop-down menu inside the Features-box which contains the tags of the chosen layer.

To change or delete an annotation, double-click on the annotation (span or link annotations). The Actions-box is now activated. Changes and Deletions are possible via the respective buttons.

Link annotations (between POS tags) are created by selecting the starting POS-tag, then dragging the arrow to connect it to its target POS tag. All possible targets are highlighted.

The Layer box in the right sidebar shows the presently active layer span layer. To create a span annotation, select a span of text or double click on a word.

If a relation layer is defined on top of a span layer, clicking on a corresponding span annotation and dragging the mouse creates a relation annotation.

Once an annotation has been created or if an annotation is selected, the Annotation box shows the features of the annotation.

The result of changing the active layer in the Layer box while an annotation is selected depends on the Remember layer setting. If this setting is disabled, changing the active layer causes the currently selected annotation to be deleted and replaced with an annotation of the selected layer. In this mode, it is necessary to unselect the current annotation by pressing the Clear button before an annotation on another layer can be created. If Remember layer is enabled, changing the active layer has no effect on the currently selected annotation.

The definition of layers is covered in Section Layers.

Once the document is opened, a default of 5 sentences is loaded on the annotation page. The Settings button will allow you to specify the settings of the annotation layer.

The Editor setting can be used to switch between different modes of presentation. It is currently only available on the annotation page.

The Sidebar size controls the width of the sidebar containing the annotation detail edtior and actions box. In particular on small screens, increasing this can be useful. The sidebar can be configured to take between 10% and 50% of the screen.

The Font zoom setting controls the font size in the annotation area. This setting may not apply to all editors.

The Page size controls how many sentences are visible in the annotation area. The more sentences are visible, the slower the user interface will react. This setting may not apply to all editors.

The Remember layer checkbox controls if the annotation layer selected in the Actions box. It will work as main layer during the annotation process. Only instances of this layer will be created, even if an annotation in another layer is selected. If necessary, it is possible to change active instances. Still, if a new instance is selected, the main layer is automatically activated.

The Auto-scroll setting controls if the annotation view is centered on the sentence in which the last annotation was made. This can be useful to avoid manual navigation. This setting may not apply to all editors.

The Collaps arcs setting controls whether long ranging relations can be collapsed to save space on screen. This setting may not apply to all editors.

The Read-only palette controls the coloring of annotations on read-only layers. This setting overrides any per-layer preferences.

Annotations are always immediately persistent in the backend database. Thus, it is not necessary to save the annotations explicitly. Also, losing the connection through network issues or timeouts does not cause data loss. To obtain a local copy of the current document, click on export button. The following frame will appear:

Choose your preferred format. Please take note of the facts that the plain text format does not contain any annotations and that the files in the binary format need to be unpacked before further usage. For further information the supported formats, please consult the corresponding chapter Formats.

The document will be saved to your local disk, and can be re-imported via adding the document to a project by a project manager. Please export your data periodically, at least when finishing a document or not continuing annotations for an extended period of time.

By default, the merging strategy only considers annotations if all annotators made the same annotation at the same location (i.e. complete and agreeing annotations) - i.e. it considers any annotations not provided by all annotators as a disagreement between the annotators.

However, there are situations where it is desirable to merge annotations from all annotators, even if some did not provide it. For example, if your project has two annotators, one working on POS tagging and another working on lemmatization, then as a curator, you might simply want to merge the annotators from the two. This can be done by using the Re-merge action and activating the checkbox Merge incomplete annotations. This will re-merge the current document (i.e. discard the entire state of curation and merge from scratch).

By default, the curator can see the annotators names on the curation page. However, in some cases, it may not be desirable for the curator to see the names. In this case, enable the option Anonymous curation in the project detail settings. Users with the curator role will then only see an anonymous label like Anonymized annotator 1 instead of the annotator names. Users who are project managers can still see the annotator names.

Here, you can import project archives such as the example projects provided on our website or projects exported from the Export tab.

When a user with the role project creator imports a project, that user automatically becomes a manager of the imported project. However, no permissions for the project are imported!

When a user with the role administrator imports a project, the user can choose whether to import the permissions and whether to automatically create users who have permissions on the imported project but so far do not exist. If this option to create missing users disabled, but the option to import permissions is enabled, then projects still maintain their association to users by name. If the respective user accounts are created manually after the import, the users will start showing up in the projects.

After clicking on the Users tab, you are displayed with a new pane in which you can add new users by clicking on the Add users text field. You get a dropdown list of enabled users in the system which can be added to the project. Any users which are already part of the project are not offered. As you type the dropdown list with the users is filtered to match your input. By clicking on a username or by pressing enter you can select the corresponding user. You can keep typing to add more users to the project. When you press the Add button the selected users are added to your project.

By default, the users are added to the project as annotators. If you want to assign additional roles, you can do so by clicking on the user and then on Permissions pane select the appropriate permissions.

After ticking the wished permissions, click on Save. To remove a user, remove all the permissions and then click on Save.

To add or delete documents, you have to click on the tab Documents in the project pane. Two frames will be displayed. In the first frame you can import new documents.

Choose a document by clicking on Choose Files. Please mind the format, which you have to choose above. Then click on Import Document. The imported documents can be seen in the frame below. To delete a document from the project, you have to click on it and then click on Delete in the right lower corner.

All annotations belong to an annotation layer. Each layer has a structural type that defines if it is a span, a relation, or a chain. It also defines how the annotations behave and what kind of features it carries.

To manager the tagsets, click on the tab Tagsets in the project pane.

To edit one of the existing tagsets, select it by a click. Then, the tagset characteristics are displayed.

In the Frame Tagset details, you can change them, export a tagset, save the changes you made on it or delete it by clicking on Delete tagset. To change an individual tag, you select one in the list displayed in the frame Tags. You can then change its description or name or delete it by clicking Delete tag in Tag details. Please do not forget to save your changes by clicking on Save tag. To add a new tag, you have to click on Create tag in Tag details. Then you add the name and the description, which is optional. Again, do not forget to click Save tag or the new tag will not be created.

To create an own tagset, click on Create tagset and fill in the fields that will be displayed in the new frame. Only the first field is obligatory. Adding new tags works the same way as described for already existing tagsets. If you want to have a free annotation, as it could be used for lemma or meta information annotation, do not add any tags.

To export a tagset, choose the format of the export at the bottom of the frame and click Export tagset.

Two modes of exporting projects are supported:

A whole project export always serves as an archive which can be re-imported again since it includes the annotations in the format internally used by the application. In addition to the internal format, the annotations can be included in a secondary format in the export. This format is controlled by the Format drop-down field. When AUTO is selected, the file format corresponds to the format of the source document. If there is no write support for the source format, the file is exported in the WebAnno TSV3 format instead.

When exporting a whole project, the structure of the exported ZIP file is as follows:

Currently, it is not possible to choose a specific format for bulk-exporting annotations. However, this mailing list post describes how DKPro Core can be used to transform the UIMA CAS formats into alternative formats.

After clicking on Create Project on the Projects page, select automation as your project type. The detailed description may be found in Projects.

The documents, that are to be annotated, have to be uploaded in the frame Documents. Please make sure that the chosen format corresponds to the format of the files you are uploading.

To manage the automation process, choose the Automation frame. The following frame will appear:

First choose your target layer in the Select automation layer frame. If you want to train a non-custom layer, please make sure you created or imported it in the Layer frame (for instructions to do so, see Projects).

Here you may choose the format of the target layer and optionally add some feature layers on which you want to train.

In the tab Target layer you may upload training files containing the target layer in WebAnno Export formats (WebAnno CPH TEI reader, plain text, binary format, XMI format, old WebAnno Format, WebAnno Format, Weblicht TCF Format, for more information on these formats, see [https://code.google.com/p/webanno/wiki/Format?ts=1407336468&updated=Format Format]).

In the next tab TAB-SEP target, you may upload training files containing the target layer in a tab-separated format, which is structured by writing each single word in a line together with its target tag, separated by a tab. Sentences are separated by blank lines.

The same goes analogically for the feature layers. The Other layers tab gives the possibility to upload WebAnno Export formats and choosing the layers that are to be used in training in the format window. The TAB-SEP feature tab gives the possibility to upload files in the above described tab-separated format, containing the feature tags in the second column. Every file will be regarded as one separate feature.

After choosing the training files, uploading them in the right format and importing them (by clicking on Import), every file will be displayed in the corresponding tab in the frame Documents. Click on the button Start Automation on the left, when you have uploaded your training data. Be prepared to wait for some time, as automation is a non-trivial process.

You can see that the automation has finished either by the fact that the Start Automation button is enabled again, or on the Monitoring page, by choosing the project in Monitoring and looking at the progress shown in the Training results /status frame.

To see the tags that were automatically created during the previously described, go to Home and choose the Automation page. Then select a project and a file, analogically to Annotation. The page, which is demonstrated below will be displayed. The navigation, export and the marking of finished documents is the same as in Annotation.

In the lower part, you see two horizontal frames, the lower one showing the automatically created annotation. By clicking on the tags, they are selected and therefore appear in the upper frame Annotation. You may see that selected tags turn grey in the Automation frame and blue in the Annotation frame. You may also add new tags to the Annotation, just like on the Annotation page.

To import a constraints file, go to Project and click on the particular project name. On the left side of the screen, a tab bar opens. Choose Constraints. You can now choose a constraint file by clicking on Choose Files. Then, click on Import. Upon import, the application checks if the constraints file is well formed. If they conform to the rules of writing constraints, the constraints are applied.

A constraint set consists of two components:

It is necessary to declare short names for all fully qualified names because only short names can be used when writing a constraint rule. Short names cannot contain any dots or special characters, only letters, numbers, and the underscore.

Scopes consist of a scope name and one or more rules that refer to a particular annotation layer and define restrictions for particular conditions. For example, it is possible to reorder the applicable tags for a POS layer, based on what kind of word the annotator is focusing on.

While scope names can be freely chosen, scope rules have a fixed structure. They consist of conditions and restrictions, separated by an arrow symbol (→). Conditions consist of a path and a value, separated by an equal sign (=). Values always have to be embraced by double-quotes. Multiple conditions in the same rule are connected via the &-operator, multiple restrictions in the same rule are connected via the |-operator.

Typically a rule’s syntax is

This leads to the following structure:

Both conditions and restrictions are composed of a path and a value. The latter is always enclosed in double quotes.

A condition is a way of defining whether a particular situation in WebAnno is based on annotation layers and features in it. Conditions can be defined on features with string, integer or boolean values, but in any case, the value needs to be put into quotes (e.g. someBooleanFeature="true", someIntegerFeature="2").

A condition set consists of one or more conditions. They are connected with logical AND as follows.

A restriction set defines a set of restrictions which can be applied if a particular condition set is evaluated to true. As multiple restrictions inside one rule are interpreted as conjunctions, they are separated by the |-operator. Restrictions can only be defined on String-valued features that are associated with a tagset.

A path is composed of one or more steps, separated by a dot. A step consists of a feature selector and a type selector. Type selectors are only applicable while writing the condition part of a rule. They comprise a layer operator @ followed by the type (Lemma, POS, etc). Feature selectors consist of a feature name, e.g.

Navigation across layers is possible via

Hereby all annotations of type <shortLayerName> at the same position as the current context are found.

TSV files are always encoded in UTF-8. However, the offsets used in the TSV file are based on UTF-16. This is important when using TSV files with texts containing e.g. Emojis or some modern non-latin Asian, Middle-eastern and African scripts.

WebAnno is implemented in Java. The Java platform internally uses a UTF-16 representation for text. For this reason, the offsets used in the TSV format currently represent offsets of the 16bit units in UTF-16 strings. This is important if your text contains Unicode characters that cannot be represented in 16bit and which thus require two 16bit units. For example a token represented by the Unicode character 😊 (U+1F60A) requires two 16bit units. Hence, the offset count increased by 2 for this character. So Unicode characters starting at U+10000 increase the offset count by 2.

WebAnno TSV 3.2 file starts with the following header marker

Layers are marked by the # character followed by T_SP= for span types (including slot features), T_CH= for chain layers, and T_RL= for relation layers. Every layer is written in new line, followed by the features in the layer. If all layer type exists, first, all the span layers will be written, then the chain layer, and finally the relation layers. Features are separated by the | character and only the short name of the feature is provided.

Here the layer name is webanno.custom.Pred and the features are named bestSense, lemmaMapped, senseId, senseMapped. Slot features start with a prefix ROLE_ followed by the name of the role and the link. The role feature name and the link feature name are separated by the _ character.

The target of the slot feature always follows the role/link name

Here the name of the role is webanno.custom.SemPred:RoleSet and the name of the role link is webanno.custom.SemPredRoleSetLink and the target type is uima.tcas.Annotation.

Chain layers will have always two features, referenceType and referenceRelation.

Relation layers will come at last in the list and the very last entry in the features will be the type of the base (governor or dependent) annotations with a prefix BT_.

Here, the relation type de.tudarmstadt.ukp.dkpro.core.api.syntax.type.dependency.Dependency has a feature DependencyType and the relation is between a base type of de.tudarmstadt.ukp.dkpro.core.api.lexmorph.type.pos.POS.

In this section we discuss the different representations of texts and annotation in WebAnno TSV3format