Annotald

Annotald is a program that facilitates editing of phrase structure in labeled bracketing format. The program is tightly integrated with the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC). The program, as well as this documentation, is a work in progress, and should be expected to be incomplete in various ways. Users are encouraged to save their files frequently and back them up to a repository to prevent loss of data.

Installing and running

In addition to the Annotald program files, included in the treedrawing directory of the IcePaHC git repository, the following 3rd party programs and libraries are required:

• Python 2 (not compatible with Python 3, yet)
• CherryPy 3 (not compatible with CherryPy 2)
• Google Chrome (not compatible with any other browser)

CherryPy is required in order to launch the Annotald web server that handles communication between the web-based Annotald user interface and manipulation of files on the hard drive. To install CherryPy 3 on Ubuntu, type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install python-cherrypy3

To run Annotald from the IcePaHC parsing directory and open the file "filename.psd", type:

./annotald filename.psd

This is equivalent to:

python ../treedrawing/treedrawing.py filename.psd

When the program runs it starts a webserver on port 8080. You can then edit "filename.psd" by directing Google Chrome to the following path:

http://localhost:8080

General philosophy

Annotald is designed to maximize the speed of phrase structure annotation. It is important for the understand the philosophy of the design to make the most of the program. First, most tasks can be performed without ever taking the right hand off the mouse and the left hand off its normal position at the left side of the keyboard. Sometimes it is possible to enter a phrase label or tag using the full keyboard, but this is rarely a good idea, since it takes the annotator's hands out of the previously described position where all the shortcuts are accessible.

Selecting and unselecting nodes

Nodes are selected by left clicking them. The first node selected becomes the "startnode" and the second node selected becomes the "endnode" for the purposes of commands that deal with more than one node at a time. Only two nodes can be selected at any one time. Clicking a selected node unselects the node. When one of two selected nodes is unselected, the remaining selected node becomes the "startnode", whether it had that status before or not.

The fastest way to clear the selection entirely, including both nodes if two are selected, is to press the space bar. Another way to unselect everything is to click the highlighted area to each side of editing area where the sentences are displayed.