[RNLD] ELAN tiers and types

[John Mansfield]

Hi Aidan,

I've messed about with ELAN xml a bit, and found the following to be the
essence of how the hierarchies are coded.

Linguistic type elements at the bottom of the xml determine which are
"master" (alignable) types and which are dependents, either as symbolic
subdivisions or symbolic associations. E.g.:

<LINGUISTIC_TYPE GRAPHIC_REFERENCES="false" LINGUISTIC_TYPE_ID="po
(practical orthography)" *TIME_ALIGNABLE="true*"/>
  <LINGUISTIC_TYPE CONSTRAINTS="*Symbolic_Subdivision*"
GRAPHIC_REFERENCES="false" LINGUISTIC_TYPE_ID="mb (morpheme boundaries)"
TIME_ALIGNABLE="false"/>
    <LINGUISTIC_TYPE CONSTRAINTS="*Symbolic_Subdivision*"
GRAPHIC_REFERENCES="false" LINGUISTIC_TYPE_ID="gl (interlinear gloss)"
TIME_ALIGNABLE="false"/>
    <LINGUISTIC_TYPE CONSTRAINTS="*Symbolic_Association*"
GRAPHIC_REFERENCES="false" LINGUISTIC_TYPE_ID="tf (free translation)"
TIME_ALIGNABLE="false"/>


Then the actual tiers reference each other to form the hierarchy. A master
tier is like this:

<TIER DEFAULT_LOCALE="en" LINGUISTIC_TYPE_REF="po (practical orthography)"
PARTICIPANT="Bob" TIER_ID="po at Bob"> ... </TIER>

... And a dependent is like this:

<TIER DEFAULT_LOCALE="en" LINGUISTIC_TYPE_REF="tf (free translation)" *
PARENT_REF="po at Bob"* PARTICIPANT="Bob" TIER_ID="tf at Bob">

But the referencing of dependents to masters also works on the level of
individual annotations. A master annotation looks like this:

<ANNOTATION>
            <ALIGNABLE_*ANNOTATION
ANNOTATION_ID="a421"*TIME_SLOT_REF1="ts256" TIME_SLOT_REF2="ts260">
                <ANNOTATION_VALUE>nangkal nyini-yu</ANNOTATION_VALUE>
            </ALIGNABLE_ANNOTATION>
        </ANNOTATION>


And one of it's dependents like this:

<ANNOTATION>
            <REF_ANNOTATION ANNOTATION_ID="a781" *ANNOTATION_REF="a421"*>
                <ANNOTATION_VALUE>who was that?</ANNOTATION_VALUE>
            </REF_ANNOTATION>
        </ANNOTATION>

You will also notice that the master annotation references two TIME_SLOT
elements, that give its start and end points.

I hope that helps. I'll separately send you an example file.

j





On 12 September 2012 10:06, Aidan Wilson <aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm having immense trouble with a collection of transcripts I'm building
> at the moment. I have never been successful in creating hierarchies of
> tiers. Ideally, I want to have a hierarchy like this:
>
> -[initials]
>         –transcription
>         -morpheme gloss
>         -free translation
>         -action
>
> for each participant. In reading through the manuals and so forth, I've
> created linguistic types like 'group' (for the outermost parent tier),
> transcription, morpheme gloss and so on, but what's happening when I create
> my tiers is that by trying to select a parent tier, the 'linguistic type'
> pull-down menu disappears and the 'add' button goes grey. It only allow me
> to create tiers (or change existing tiers) if I don't plan on nesting them,
> it seems.
>
> Has someone got a link to instructions, or even better, a working template
> than I can reverse-engineer?
>
> What I'm hoping to do is go through my transcripts with a text editor and
> manually nest them by editing the xml (unless I can figure out how to
> retrospectively nest them), but I need to know the structure of the eaf
> file.
>
> This is bringing me to tears, as it were.
>
> --
> Aidan Wilson
>
> Dept of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
> The University of Melbourne
>
> +61428 458 969
> aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
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