Text annotation is a valuable method of adding metadata to an existing text or document. However, there is no standard text annotation tool across disciplines, in part because of the variety of disciplinary needs. This document presents the AFLEX Tag Tool Architecture (ATTA), a modular software system to allow the development of text annotation tools across disciplines that vary in user interface according the needs of the disciplinary users, but share a common technical back end, ATTA.

This research describes the development of ATTA, along with the development of four different ATTA-based software tools related to text annotation that meet the needs of different stakeholders: Tag Tool 1, Tag Tool 2, the Review Tool, and the Checklist Tool. All tools are web-based applications that store data to an online database. ATTA-based tools have been found to be useful not only for performing text annotation as its own end goal, but also as a method of data collection for training machine learning classifiers that perform automated text analysis.