Implemented to Be Shared: the WoPoss Annotation of Semantic Modality in a Latin Diachronic Corpus

The FNS project A world of possibilities (WoPoss) studies the evolution of modal meanings in the Latin language. Passages expressing modal notions such as ‘possibility and ‘necessity’ are annotated following a pipeline that combines both automatic and manual annotation. This paper discusses the creation, annotation and processing of the WoPoss corpus. Texts are first gathered from different online open access resources to create the initial dataset. Due to the heterogeneity of formats and encodings, these texts are regularized before the application of an automatic linguistic annotation. The annotated files are then uploaded to the annotation platform INCEpTION. Through this platform, annotators add the relevant linguistic and semantic information following the WoPoss guidelines. The results of the automatic annotation are also curated. The fine-grained semantic annotation is the core activity of the WoPoss workflow, thus this paper focuses on the preparation of files and how the semantic annotation task is tackled.