Experiments in human-computer cooperation for the semantic annotation of Portuguese corpora

In this paper, we present a system to aid human annotation of semantic information in the scope of the project AC/DC, called corte-e-costura. This system leverages on the human annotation effort, by providing the annotator with a simple system that applies rules incrementally. Our goal was twofold: first, to develop an easy-to-use system that required a minimum of learning from the part of the linguist; second, one that provided a straightforward way of checking the results obtained, in order to immediately evaluate the results of the rules devised. After explaining the motivation for its development from scratch, we present the current status of the AC/DC project and provide a quantitative description of its material in what concerns semantic annotation. We then present the corte-e-costura system in detail, providing the result of our first experiments with the semantic fields of colour and clothing. We end the paper with some discussion of future work as well as of the experience gained.