  This paper elaborates on the notion of uncertainty in the context of
annotation in large text corpora, specifically focusing on (but not limited to)
historical languages. Such uncertainty might be due to inherent properties of
the language, for example, linguistic ambiguity and overlapping categories of
linguistic description, but could also be caused by lacking annotation
expertise. By examining annotation uncertainty in more detail, we identify the
sources and deepen our understanding of the nature and different types of
uncertainty encountered in daily annotation practice. Moreover, some practical
implications of our theoretical findings are also discussed. Last but not
least, this article can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the perspectives of
the main scientific disciplines involved in corpus projects, linguistics and
computer science, to develop a unified view and to highlight the potential
synergies between these disciplines.
