= Linguistic annotation
<Linguistic annotation> adds explicit analytical information to language data, such as word boundaries, <part of speech>, <grammatical number> or <syntactic dependencies>. The original text and the assigned labels are distinct: an annotation records an analysis under stated conventions, rather than being an uninterpreted observation.
In the sentence `Birds fly`, one analysis assigns the <lemma (linguistics)> forms `bird` and `fly`, the categories <noun> and <verb>, and a <subject (grammar)> relationship connecting the first word to the second. <Universal Dependencies> represents such information in <CoNLL-U>, separating word forms, <lemma (linguistics)> forms, grammatical features and dependency fields.<CoNLL-U Format in Universal Dependencies>[ten-column format, FORM, LEMMA, UPOS, FEATS, HEAD and DEPREL]{ref}
Keeping those layers separate permits a revised grammatical analysis without silently changing the underlying recording. It also makes disagreement inspectable: two annotators may agree on the text but assign different categories. A reusable annotated <text corpus> therefore needs its conventions and ambiguous cases documented alongside the labels.
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