Creating Annotation Tools with the Annotation Graph Toolkit

The Annotation Graph Toolkit is a collection of software supporting the development of annotation tools based on the annotation graph model. The toolkit includes application programming interfaces for manipulating annotation graph data and for importing data from other formats. There are interfaces for the scripting languages Tcl and Python, a database interface, specialized graphical user interfaces for a variety of annotation tasks, and several sample applications. This paper describes all the toolkit components for the benefit of would-be application developers.

Models and Tools for Collaborative Annotation

The Annotation Graph Toolkit (AGTK) is a collection of software which facilitates development of linguistic annotation tools. AGTK provides a database interface which allows applications to use a database server for persistent storage. This paper discusses various modes of collaborative annotation and how they can be supported with tools built using AGTK and its database interface. We describe the relational database schema and API, and describe a version of the TableTrans tool which supports collaborative annotation. The remainder of the paper discusses a high-level query language for annotation graphs, along with optimizations, in support of expressive and efficient access to the annotations held on a large central server. The paper demonstrates that it is straightforward to support a variety of different levels of collaborative annotation with existing AGTK-based tools, with a minimum of additional programming effort.

TableTrans, MultiTrans, InterTrans and TreeTrans: Diverse Tools Built on the Annotation Graph Toolkit

Four diverse tools built on the Annotation Graph Toolkit are described. Each tool associates linguistic codes and structures with time-series data. All are based on the same software library and tool architecture. TableTrans is for observational coding, using a spreadsheet whose rows are aligned to a signal. MultiTrans is for transcribing multi-party communicative interactions recorded using multi-channel signals. InterTrans is for creating interlinear text aligned to audio. TreeTrans is for creating and manipulating syntactic trees. This work demonstrates that the development of diverse tools and re-use of software components is greatly facilitated by a common high-level application programming interface for representing the data and managing input/output, together with a common architecture for managing the interaction of multiple components.