SHADE: Semantic Hypernym Annotator for Domain-Specific Entities - Dungeons and Dragons Domain Use Case

Manual data annotation is an important NLP task but one that takes a considerable amount of resources and effort. In spite of the costs, labelling and categorizing entities are essential for NLP tasks such as semantic evaluation. Even though annotation can be done by non-experts in most cases, due to the fact that this requires human labour, the process is costly. Another major challenge encountered in data annotation is maintaining annotation consistency. Annotation efforts are typically carried out by teams of multiple annotators. The annotations need to maintain consistency in relation to both the domain truth and annotation format while reducing human errors. Annotating a specialized domain that deviates significantly from the general domain, such as fantasy literature, will see a significant amount of human error and annotator disagreement. So it is vital that proper guidelines and error reduction mechanisms are enforced. One way to enforce these constraints is by using a specialized application. Such an app can ensure that the notations are consistent, and the labels can be pre-defined or restricted reducing the room for errors. In this paper, we present SHADE, an annotation software that can be used to annotate entities in the high fantasy literature domain Dungeons and Dragons extracted from the Forgotten Realms Fandom Wiki.

I. INTRODUCTION

Dungeons and Dragons (also known as D&D or DnD) is a turn-based tabletop role-playing game which has gained immense popularity in the last 5 decades. In this game, typically set in a fantasy setting, a group of players role-play characters and embark on epic adventures¹

Adventure or module is a game guide that manages player knowledge and activities for a specific scenario, typically with a cohesive narrative

conducted by one player in the special role of Dungeon Master. It is a form of an open-ended game, meaning that there are no correct paths to play the game [1]. The player's interpretation of the game world (sandbox) and its underlying rules help to progress in the game. In D&D, the rules applicable for game-play come from the official rule books [2], [3], campaign²

Campaign refers to a game guide for an overarching story-line across multiple adventures, typically with the same set of characters.

rules as well as non-official rules implemented by the Dungeon Master. These game-world rules not only govern player actions but it is also intertwined with the setting³

The setting generally is the world of the game. In some instances, however, a setting may incorporate multiple worlds.

as well.