How to Create Annotation Guidelines

This chapter gives a brief practical introduction into the development of annotation guidelines, for the scenario that new guidelines are created for a phenomenon or concept that has been described theoretically. In a single sentence, the goal of annotation guidelines can be formulated as: Given a theoretically described phenomenon or concept, describe it as generic as possible but as precise as necessary so that human annotators can annotate the concept or phenomenon in any text without running into problems or ambiguity issues. 

The contents of this article have first been published in German language in 10.1515/9783110693973-009. The text has been translated into English by Svenja Guhr, and slightly updated by Svenja Guhr and Nils Reiter.