Annotation Snippets and Prompts I Reuse

~6–7 min · Updated Sep 2025

Introduction

After months annotating patient narratives, you notice the same situations repeating. The same questions come back: is this an intensity marker or a pain quality, is this metaphor violent or about weight, do I tag knife as a quality or as an entailment. Rather than reinventing the wheel every time, I built a small toolkit of snippets and prompts I reuse across projects.

These pieces come from the Language of Endometriosis Project and now support onboarding, guidelines, and quick QA for tools like the prototype pain tagger and the Explain My Pain app.

Why snippets help

Core snippets from the taxonomy

Qualities versus intensity

Quality is what pain feels like: burning, stabbing, throbbing, dull. Intensity is how strong it is: mild, severe, unbearable, very.

Prompt Ask yourself: if you can replace the word with how strong, it is intensity. If it describes the type, it is quality.

Location tagging

Tag the smallest clear location such as womb, knee, lower back. If the patient only says body or everywhere, tag it as a general location.

Prompt Can I point to it on a body map. If yes, tag it as a location.

Metaphors and entailments

Violence includes knives, stabbing, war, attack. Weight includes pressure, crushing, heavy load. Heat includes fire and burning. Animal includes beast and claws. Containment includes trapped, locked, caged.

Prompt What does the metaphor do to the patient. Attack, trap, crush, burn, or bite.

Temporal markers

Tag phrases that place pain in time such as constant, comes and goes, at night, before period.

Prompt Does this phrase tell me when pain happens or changes.

QA snippets I often reuse

These saved hours in the endometriosis study and kept the workflow realistic.

Prompts for training or recruitment

Short prompts that test judgment without overwhelming candidates.

  1. Tag all categories in “a burning knife in my stomach at night”.

    Expected Quality burning or knife, Location stomach, Temporal at night, Entailment violence plus heat.

  2. Differentiate “mild cramps” and “stabbing cramps”.

    Expected Intensity versus quality.

  3. Identify entailment “a beast clawing at me”.

    Expected Animal metaphor implying unpredictability and hostility.

Closing

Annotation does not need to start from zero every time. A set of reusable snippets and prompts keeps projects lean, consistent, and teachable. From the Language of Endometriosis corpus to the pain tagger and the app, these small pieces are the glue that holds the work together.

The taxonomy provides the categories, QA keeps them consistent, the prototype makes them measurable, and the snippets make the whole process repeatable.