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# LDC Software and Annotation Infrastructure

- Systems Group / Systems Service Center formed circa 2008
- Software Group formed 2011 to focus on collection, annotation, delivery
- Hardware concerns shared by both groups, notably:
    - Software Group increasing handles VMs in the cloud
    - Software Group handles collection equipment, i.e. recording audio and video

# Timeline

- Before 2011 siloed desktop apps
    - effective but lacked flexibilty
- Since 2011, focus on web apps
- Since 2018, introduction of cloud solutions
- 2025 introduction of Agentic AI
- Future web and desktop apps for secure environments

# Annotation Types

- mention, entity, coref:  from text extents
- various event and semantic annotations from text, audio, video
- bounding box and sequencing to support multilingual OCR
- audio auditing and waveform based transcription

# Customizable Annotation Software

- impossible (ok, impractical)
- Even in house customization only wasn't successful
- As you increase flexibility you increase difficulty
- Technology also changes too rapidly, changing the landscape
- The middle ground of "customizable" really needs developer support
- This is still true with AI agents because they need guidance

# To the web and back again

- LDC had web apps in the 90's, the CGI era
- However, serious annotation was desktop until circa 2011
- In a just a few years, all annotation was web based
- The web technology landscape has changed rapidly
- Unfortunately is the change is mostly an increase in complexity
- The move to the web was very much desirable
- However, agentic AI has led me to question if desktop apps should be reconsidered

# Links


- This poster describes our transcription tool, but many of the points apply to other tools we've done.  [asa2021](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/asa2021-high-quality-recordings.pdf)
- This is our PennSound poster.  [asa2026](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/evaluation-speech-to-text-penn-sound-poster.pdf)
- LanguageARC Citizen Science portal.  [LanguageArc](https://languagearc.org)
- Language Game [NameThatLanguage](https://namethatlanguage.com)
- This shows off some of our recording hardware capabilities.  [mics](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/about/facilities/human-subjects-collection)
- Our CAMIO paper with pics of bounding boxes [camio](https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/lrec2022-camio-.pdf)