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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
• This is our PennSound poster. asa2026
• LanguageARC Citizen Science portal. LanguageArc
• Language Game NameThatLanguage
• This shows off some of our recording hardware capabilities. mics
• Our CAMIO paper with pics of bounding boxes camio