extracting utterances from specified tier ID

Tue Jul 8 20:36:17 UTC 2025

Hi Mingyu,

The * (star) is a wildcard in CLAN. It matches zero (nothing) or more any characters. There is also "_" character that matches just one any character, Combining those two like so _* would mean match one or more any characters. Those wildcard characters are most useful with +/-s option. If you want to specify literal * (star) character, then use \* combination.

Right after the +/-t option is the only place in CLAN where * (star) is always literal star character not a wildcard.

Leonid.

> On Jul 7, 2025, at 17:41, 'Mingyu Yuan' via chibolts <chibolts at googlegroups.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Leonid, 
> 
> This is helpful! Thank you for the clarification. It looks like tPAR and t*PAR are what I intended to use. As for tPAR*, the wildcard character at the end matches anything that might follow PAR, as I understand it. Does it also match 'nothing', i.e. the tier name is exactly PAR? Thank you!
> 
> Best,
> Mingyu
> On Monday, July 7, 2025 at 1:46:29 PM UTC-7 Leonid Spektor wrote:
>> One more thing about +/-t options. The name(s)/code(s) are not case sensitive.
>> 
>> For more short cut "+tpar" is the same as "+t*PAR:"
>> 
>> 
>> Leonid.
>> 
>>> On Jul 7, 2025, at 16:40, Leonid Spektor <spe... at andrew.cmu.edu <>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Mingyu,
>>> 
>>> The +/-t options convention is following:
>>> 
>>> +/-t%mor	- include or exclude all %mor utterances.
>>> 
>>> The * (star) right after "+/-t" is a literal star. All speaker tiers start with a star character, i.e. *PAR: text.
>>> 
>>> +/-tPAR - is a short cut, if the star is missing after the "t", then it is assumed you want speaker tiers.
>>> 
>>> +/-t*PAR - no short cuts, just explicit way to specify specific speaker tier.
>>> 
>>> +/-tPAR* - star at the end means wildcard character that matches anything there is.
>>> 		Some corpuses have speakers *PAR-one: and  *PAR-two: and so on.
>>> 
>>> +/-t*PAR* - the same a above, just more explicit.
>>> 
>>> Hope this helps,
>>> 
>>> Leonid.
>>> 
>>>> On Jul 7, 2025, at 15:58, 'Mingyu Yuan' via chibolts <chib... at googlegroups.com <>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hi everyone, 
>>>> 
>>>> I have a question about extracting participants' utterances using CLAN commands and was wondering if I'm thinking along the right lines. I'd appreciate it if you could take a look. Thanks!
>>>> 
>>>> I'm working with DementiaBank, specifically the ADReSS dataset, a subset of the Pitt corpus. I used the following command to extract the 'flow' tier of participants' utterances: `flo +cr +tPAR*`. Here, I have the asterisk * placed after the PAR identifier. But I noticed that in the CLAN manual, the asterisk typically precedes it, as in `t*PAR`. 
>>>> 
>>>> I got the following output after running `t*PAR`
>>>> 
>>>> flo (13-Apr-2023) is conducting analyses on:
>>>>   ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *PAR;
>>>> 
>>>> And here's the output after running `tPAR*`
>>>> 
>>>> flo (13-Apr-2023) is conducting analyses on:
>>>>   ONLY speaker main tiers matching: *PAR*;
>>>> 
>>>> It looks like the asterisk is used to search for tier ID patterns. Since all my files contain only INV and PAR tiers, I assume tier matching would only affect the selection of the PAR tier. I also used a Python function to verify that the utterances extracted by these two commands were identical (attached below, in case it's helpful). 
>>>> 
>>>> Both commands appear to work, but I don't fully understand why. Please let me know your thoughts. Thank you very much!
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> Mingyu
>>>> 
>>>> def check_clan_command(id, file_old, file_new):
>>>>     # Read the .cex file created by the old command (i.e. with tPAR*)
>>>>     with open(PATH_TO_OLD_FILE, 'r') as file_old_cmd:
>>>>         file_o = file_old_cmd.read().splitlines()
>>>>     # Read the .cex file created by the new command (i.e. with t*PAR)
>>>>     with open(PATH_TO_NEW_FILE, 'r') as file_new_cmd:
>>>>         file_n = file_new_cmd.read().splitlines()
>>>>     print(id, file_o == file_n)
>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
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