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UAM CorpusTool: Text Annotation made Easy

The UAM CorpusTool is a state-of-the-art environment for annotation of text corpora. So, whether you are annotating a corpus as part of a linguistic study, or building a training set for use in statistical language processing, this is the tool for you.

NOTE: Image Annotation has now been spun off as a separate application. See here.

Powerful Annotation Tool

  • Annotation of multiple texts using the same annotation schemes, of your design.
  • Annotation of each text at multiple levels (e.g., NP, Clause, Sentence, whole document).
  • Searching for instances across levels, e.g., finite-clause containing company-np, or future-clause in introduction.
  • Comparative statistics across subsets, e.g., contrasting conversational patterns used by male and female speakers.
  • All annotation is in stored in XML files, meaning that your annotations can more easily be shared with other applications.
  • We use "stand-off" XML: the annotation files do not contain the text, just pointers to the text. This allows for multiple overlapping analyses of the same text, not so easy in standard XML.

Easy to Use

UAM CorpusTool has been crafted to make the text annotation experience simple.

  • The Project Window is where you manage each project. It is used to add or remove layers from your study, to add or remove files to the corpus, and also to open each document for annotation at whatever layer.

  • Creating the annotation scheme is simple with the graphical scheme editor, allowing cross-classification as well as sub-specification of features. Any change in the scheme (e.g., deleting or renaming a feature) automatically updates all the annotation files in the project.
  • Annotating text segments is as easy as swiping some text (click down and drag to end of segment) and then indicating the features that are appropiate for that segment. Alternatively, the user can nominate that all files should be pre-segmented into sentences, and advance through the text coding each sentence. Later we will be adding automatic identification of named entities, and noun phrases.
     

  • Searching your corpus is via the Corpus Search interface. Complex queries are possible, using features at different annotation levels (below we show NPs coded as "device" in documents annotated as "english"). You can also search for segmments CONTAINING another segment type, or containing one or more words of text. Concordance search is also possible, e.g., "sentence containing "be@ @participle" will find all segments identified as sentence which contain a be verb followed by a participle verb (passive structures basically).
     

  • Statistical Studies: UAM CorpusTool supports a range of statistical analyses of your corpus, revealing patterns that the eye might miss. For instance, in the small study below we examine how warnings are expressed differently in English and Spanish texts.
     

  • File information: A click on a button provides information on each file in the corpus, including number of words and sentences, average word and sentence length. For English, it also offers lexical density, and breaks down pronominal usage by person.
     

    Getting UAM CorpusTool

    UAM CorpusTool runs under Windows and MacOSX, and is available free from this page

     

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