[RNLD] ELAN tiers and types

Wed Sep 12 23:17:04 UTC 2012

You can create new tiers in the file and copy the existing annotations
to them. I had success doing that for some files which were based on
an unnested template.
Claire

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 6:33 PM, Aidan Wilson
<aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Thanks Andrea, and Tom, Jeremy, John, Sally and Joe for your advice and your
> template files. I think the best way forward for me now is to try to
> mamnually edit my eaf files and nest the tiers, as creating new tiers and
> trying to re-enter the annotations I think will be too long and painful.
>
> --
> Aidan Wilson
>
> School of Languages and Linguistics
>
> The University of Melbourne
>
> +61428 458 969
> aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
>
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2012, Andrea L. Berez wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Entering the conversation a bit late because of time zones, but I have
>> some ELAN training materials that anyone is welcome to download and use.
>> They (attempt to) explain the relationship between types and tiers and
>> have exercises for building files with increasingly-complex tier structures.
>> The materials are a few years old and based on an earlier version of a
>> ELAN, but the basics have not changed.
>>
>> https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D7795324_2102134_63719
>>
>> HTH,Andrea
>> --
>> Andrea L. Berez
>> Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics
>> University of Hawai'i at MānoaDirector, Kaipuleohone UH Digital
>> Ethnographic Archive
>>
>> Technology reviews editor, Language Documentation & Conservation
>> http://www2.hawaii.edu/~aberez
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Honeyman Tom <t.honeyman at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>       Hi Aidan,
>>
>> The short answer is Nick Thieberger recently posted to this list a
>> collection of templates produced by Andrea Berez:
>>
>> http://www.rnld.org/software
>>
>> or
>>
>> http://paradisec.org.au/elansampletemplates.zip
>>
>> You could use these and modify them.
>>
>> Alternatively, I create tiers in the following way:
>>
>> First, here is an etf template file that I use to start a new
>> transcription:
>>
>> https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D138718_8778877_6506503
>>
>> To change it for your needs, open it in a text editor and search for all
>> instances of "Tom" and replace with the name of the person entering
>> the data (e.g you). Replace "XXX" with the name of the language you are
>> transcribing, and "YYY" with language of your translation. Replace
>> "English" with the language you are making utterance level comments in, if
>> it isn't English. Save the file.
>>
>> Now replace all instance of "Unknown" with the name of the person you are
>> transcribing. Save a copy of the file in a templates folder
>> somewhere and rename it with the speaker's name. Repeat the process for
>> each speaker you are transcribing. In this way I amass a template
>> file for each speaker that I have transcribed, and so when I want to start
>> a new transcription I simply import the all the relevant template
>> files in with my audio file and hey presto away I go.
>>
>> This template provides per speaker tiers for transcription, translation
>> and comments. The transcription is time aligned, while the
>> translation and comments are nested underneath. There is also a single
>> tier for time-aligned comments (i.e. general comments that don't align
>> with speakers' utterances).
>>
>> I use tier names that are compatible with exporting to toolbox. "tx" is
>> from transcriptions, "ft" is for translations, "cm" is for comments.
>> The @ + participant name bit at the end of each tier name is a trick to
>> aid exporting to toolbox. If you're not exporting to toolbox, then
>> rename these as you like (e.g. make them more verbose), but remember you
>> can't have separate tiers for each speaker that have the same name,
>> so it's best to use a similar strategy of including the speaker's name in
>> the tier name.
>>
>> Naming and establishing tiers and types consistently across a corpus is
>> really important once the corpus grows. It will allow you to search
>> across the corpus and to narrow your searches to just one tier, or type,
>> using the extremely powerful "Structured Search Multiple EAF". Say
>> for instance you wanted to limit your search to a particular speaker, you
>> would search for values within a particular tier across multiple
>> files. Say you wanted to search in your translations for all speakers,
>> then you would search within the type "YYY translation" (where YYY is
>> the language you entered). Always establishing tiers and types using
>> templates will really help to ensure the consistency which will enable
>> these kinds of searches.
>>
>> For your particular needs I would create two more tiers using the same
>> per-speaker naming strategy, and create separate types for those tiers
>> as well, both using the stereotype "symbolic association" (this is really
>> important for the nesting). Then save the file as a template, and
>> create all the individual versions for each speaker.
>>
>> I translate in both Tok Pisin and English, so I have separate tiers with
>> separate types for both of those. I also have a "tidied text" tier
>> which is less representative of the original, but, for instance replaces
>> accidental code-switching (at my consultants' request), and tidies
>> up in other ways. I have a close phonetic transcription tier for when I
>> transcribe word lists, again with a separate type. I only mention
>> these extra tiers because it really helps to add them from the start, as
>> going back and adding them afterwards is a pain.
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Tom
>>
>>
>> On 12/09/2012, at 6:06 PM, 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>