[RNLD] ELAN tiers and types

[A. D. Nakhimovsky]

When you make a copy of an existing tier, you're asked to make two
decisions: Do you want to also copy the dependent tiers? and Where in
the hierarchy would you like to place your copy? After the copy is
made and placed, you can delete the original and change the name of
the copy to the original name. I hope I haven't misunderstood the
question.

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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>



-- 
Alexander Nakhimovsky, Computer Science Department
Colgate University Hamilton NY 13346
   http://cs.colgate.edu/~sasha
Director, Linguistics Program
   http://www.colgate.edu/linguistics
Director, Project Afghanistan
   http://www.colgate.edu/projectafghanistan
t. +1 315 228 7586 f. +1 315 228 7009