The multifaceted nature of literary texts and their implicit meanings require a rigorous empirical verification of linguistic annotation criteria when converting them into a digital format. This article presents the results of a pilot empirical study aimed at verifying the practical viability of multi-level linguistic annotation criteria applied to literary materials. A pilot corpus consisting of approximately 52,000 word-forms, selected from 20th-century Uzbek prose and poetry, was analyzed by four specially trained annotators across seven levels: lexico-morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, discursive, and conceptual-cognitive. The study was based on five core management criteria: explicitness, layer independence, cross-level flexibility, interpretive transparency, and scalability. The inter-annotator agreement rate was measured using Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha, and inter-segment F1 coefficients. The data obtained from the pilot study demonstrated a differentiated nature of agreement indicators, which serves as an objective basis for the targeted refinement of the initial criteria.

linguistic annotation; literary text; criteria validation; inter-annotator agreement; multi-level analysis; Uzbek literature; digital humanities.

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