Brat

Annotate data from brat in your text editor painlessly.

Introduction

Selecting and annotating the corpus on brat is annoying and painful. With this, you can do it in the your favourite text editor of your choice. A result of laziness together with Glen.

Instead of using your mouse to select the noun phrases, waiting for the box to appear, pressing ok, waiting 10 seconds for the AJAX response to be processed, you can simply edit the tags offline, and automatically post them to the corpus.

Even though care has been taken to minimize errors, I take no responsibility for any loss of data or errors to your corpus if you choose to use this tool.

Constraints

• Currently coded to http://brat.statnlp.com/main/#/sms_corpus/students/XXXXXXXX/sms_corpus where XXXXXXXX is your username.
• Your username the same as your password
• All tags are noun-phrases

Installation

With Node.js installed, run in your command line

$ npm install -g brat

Usage - Command Line

Download the plain text corpus by going to the page with the data assigned to you. Mouseover on the top bar and click Data > Export (Document Data) > txt

With this file, you can add annotations in plain text, by separating noun phrases with { and }.

$ brat <username> <path>

Example:

$ brat 1000000 /dropbox/annotated.txt

Don't worry about running the command multiple times and polluting the corpus, the script will intelligently ignore duplicated tags.

Parameters

username: Username for brat. Password is assumed to be the same

path: Path to the annotated file

Annotations

Note that the tags can be nested:

18958 Meet {{u} outside} coop later

IntelliJ users might be interested in ctrl+alt+t which wraps selected text with {}. Similarly for Sublime Text users.

Make sure that parenthesis used are all closed, and do not add in any additional characters/whitespaces other than the { and } annotation markers. Just don't.

Usage - Node.js

You can use the functions with as a node module as well. The following code is synonymous with the command line command above.

Add the dependency first:

$ npm install --save brat

Example code

var brat = require('brat');
brat.saveToBrat(USER_ID, ANNOTATED_FILE);

API

callback is a standard Node.js callback function, with one parameter as the error.

saveToBrat(userId, path, callback)

Same as above

deleteSpans(userId, start, end, callback)

Mouseover the tags on the corpus and you will see something like ID:T35. This tag is tag number 35.

This function will remove all tags numbers ranging from start to the end.

userId: User Id

start: Integer, inclusive

end: Integer, exclusive

fixProblems(userId, callback)

Fixes problems with the corpus by detecting and deleting problematic tags

userId: User Id

removeDuplicates(userId, callback)

Checks and removes any duplicate tags from the online corpus

userId: User Id

Todo

• [ ] CLI for other useful Node.js functions
• [ ] Better checking of the annotated file