  Many annotation tools have been developed, covering a wide variety of tasks
and providing features like user management, pre-processing, and automatic
labeling. However, all of these tools use Graphical User Interfaces, and often
require substantial effort to install and configure. This paper presents a new
annotation tool that is designed to fill the niche of a lightweight interface
for users with a terminal-based workflow. Slate supports annotation at
different scales (spans of characters, tokens, and lines, or a document) and of
different types (free text, labels, and links), with easily customisable
keybindings, and unicode support. In a user study comparing with other tools it
was consistently the easiest to install and use. Slate fills a need not met by
existing systems, and has already been used to annotate two corpora, one of
which involved over 250 hours of annotation effort.
