Development and evaluation of an automatic text annotation system for supporting digital humanities research

105

In traditional humanities research, most humanities scholars studied text-type paper-based publishing texts, such as rare ancient books and historical literature. However, many research institutes, in the information society, gradually digitalized such paper-based data and established digital archives database to result in great changes in humanities research environment and knowledge acquisition channels. The research pattern with digital reading based texts became the essential development trend. For this reason, an “automatic text annotation system” for supporting digital humanities research is developed in this study. Resources from distinct database are gathered through Linked Data and integrated for the automatic annotation of texts. It allows users immediately referring to resources from other database when interpreting texts and provides friendly reading interface with text annotation for humanities scholars interpreting data through reading. With experimental research, the “automatic text annotation system” developed in this study is compared with “MARKUS semi-automatic text annotation system” for supporting humanities scholars interpreting text data to discussed the difference in reading achievement and technology acceptance. Semi-structured in-depth interviews are also proceeded to understand humanities scholars’ opinions and perception about the “automatic text annotation system” developed in this study as well as to analyze the correlations among reading achievement, technology acceptance, and user behavior course of the “automatic text annotation system”. The experimental findings show that the reading achievement with the automatic text annotation system developed in this study is higher than that with MARKUS semi-automatic text annotation system, but not achieving the significance. The technology acceptance analysis reveals remarkably better technology acceptance of the automatic text annotation system than MARKUS semi-automatic text annotation system. According to the interviews, the reading interface of the automatic text annotation system is simple and clear that it is more suitable for reading than MARKUS semi-automatic text annotation system. The ease of use and usefulness of reading interface is a key factor in humanities scholars accepting the system for the digital humanities research. In regard to the comparison of similar functions between two systems, the functions of vocabulary enquiry, linking to source web sites, and annotation appending of the automatic text annotation system are more intuitive and easy to use than those of MARKUS semi-automatic text annotation system. What is more, humanities scholars emphasize more on the sentence segmentation function than the automatic word segmentation function, and the linked source database, Moedict, appears the best assistance. Finally, there is no significant correlation between reading achievement and user behavior course with the automatic text annotation system.