Category Archives: Development

New Features in Manual Annotation Editor

The built-in Manual Annotation Editor component has undergone a series of changes. The span-of-text annotation editor is now faster and more flexible. We have also improved the navigability and extended a range of actions that can be performed on annotations.

The list of features include:

  • Fast rendering of span-of-text annotations regardless of the size of documents.
  • Manually creating span-of-text annotations and adjusting their boundaries.
  • Colour coding of span-of-text annotations.
  • Full support for nested and intersecting span-of-text annotations.
  • Creating complex annotations that consist of attributes (of primitives types such as integers, strings, boolean, etc.) and references to other annotations.
  • Structural consistency of annotations is ensured by type systems (annotation schemata).
  • Easy navigation between annotated documents.
  • Annotation can be paused and resumed at a later visit.

Creating Annotation with SPARQL

One of the biggest challenges in developing UIMA workflows is the incompatibility of components that support different type systems, and yet, could exchange conceptually similar annotation structures. For instance, the output Sentence type of a sentence detector may be incompatible with the input Sentence type of a named entity recogniser only because the two seemingly the same types were defined in two different type systems. A less trivial source of incompatibility is when two conceptually equivalent types are structurally different, for instance, coreference phenomenon can be encoded as a chain (a linked list) or as an array.

We have developed SPARQL Annotation Editor, a processing component that allows a developer to manipulate annotations (and thus convert types) by using SPARQL queries. Using a widely adopted query language makes this solution more approachable and encourages ad-hoc conversions that would otherwise have to be done programmatically.

Type system alignment using SPARQL will be presented at the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop & Interoperability with Discourse that takes place in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 8 August. An online tutorial will follow shortly.

The details are covered in the following paper which will appear in the workshop proceedings:

Rak, R. and Ananiadou, S. (To appear). Making UIMA Truly Interoperable with SPARQL. In: Proceedings of the 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop & Interoperability with Discourse