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<Paper uid="W01-1515">
  <Title>Annotation Tools Based on the Annotation Graph API</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
TRAINS/DAMSL Corpus
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> components can be modified or replaced when building new special-purpose tools.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Graphical User Interfaces
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.1 A spreadsheet component
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Dialogue annotation typically consists of assigning a field-structured record to each utterance in each speaker turn. A key challenge is to handle overlapping turns and back-channel cues without disrupting the structure of individual speaker contributions. The tool side-steps these problems by permitting utterances to be independently aligned to a (multi-channel) recording. The records are displayed in a spreadsheet; clicking on a row of the spreadsheet causes the corresponding extent of audio signal to be highlighted. As an extended recording is played back, annotated sections are highlighted, in both the waveform and spreadsheet displays.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Figure 4 shows the tool with a section of the TRAINS/DAMSL corpus (Jurafsky et al., 1997).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> Note that the highlighted segment in the audio channel corresponds to the highlighted annotation in the spreadsheet.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.2 An interlinear transcription component
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Interlinear text is a kind of text in which each word is annotated with phonological, morphological and syntactic information (displayed under the word) and each sentence is annotated with a free translation. Our tool  permits interlinear transcription aligned to a primary audio signal, for greater accuracy and accountability. Whole words and sub-parts of words can be easily aligned with the audio.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Clicking on a piece of the annotation causes the corresponding extent of audio signal to be highlighted. As an extended recording is played back, annotated sections are highlighted (both waveform and interlinear text displays).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The screenshot in Figure 5 shows the tool with some interlinear text from Mawu (a Manding language of the Ivory Coast, West Africa).</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.3 A waveform display component
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The tools described above utilize WaveSurfer and Snack (Sj&amp;quot;olander, 2000; Sj&amp;quot;olander and Beskow, 2000). We have developed a plug-in for WaveSurfer to support the inter-component communication described in this paper.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Available Software and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The Annotation Graph Toolkit, version 1.0, contains a complete implementation of the annotation graph model, import filters for several formats, loading/storing data to an annotation server (MySQL), application programming interfaces in C++ and Tcl/tk, and example annotation tools for dialogue, ethology and interlinear text. The supported formats are: xlabel, TIMIT, BAS Partitur, Penn Treebank, Switchboard, LDC Callhome, CSV and AIF level 0. All software is distributed under an open source license, and is available from http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/AG/.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Future work will provide Python and Perl interfaces, more supported formats, a query language and interpreter, a multichannel transcription tool, and a client/server model.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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