The Mate Workbench - a tool for annotating XML corpora

This paper describes the design and implementation of the MATE workbench, a program which provides support for flexible display and editing of XML annotations, and complex querying of a set of linked files. The workbench was designed to support the annotation of XML coded linguistic corpora, but it could be used to annotate any kind of data, as it is not dependent on any particular annotation scheme. Rather than being a general purpose XMLaware editor it is a system for writing specialised editors tailored to a particular annotation task. A particular editor is defined using a transformation language, with suitable display formats and allowable editing operations. The workbench is written in Java, which means that it is platform-independent. This paper outlines the design of the workbench software and compares it with other annotation programs. 1. Introduction The annotation or markup of files with linguistic or other complex information usually requires either human coding or human ..

The MATE workbench annotation tool, a technical description

The MATE workbench is a tool which aims to simplify the tasks of annotating, displaying and querying speech or text corpora. It is designed to help humans create language resources, and to make it easier for different groups to use one another's data, by providing one tool which can be used with many different annotation schemes. Any annotation scheme which can be converted to XML can be used with the workbench, and display formats optimised for particular annotation tasks are created using a transformation language similar to XSLT. The workbench is written entirely in Java, which means that it is platform-independent. 1. Introduction The MATE workbench provides a general framework for defining specialised annotation editors, and makes the writing of an editor tool for a particular annotation scheme and particular annotation task relatively easy. This generality is provided by allowing the use of any annotation schema coded in XML (Bray et al., 1998; Goldfarb and Prescod, 1998) and b..

Annotating Communication Problems Using the MATE Workbench

The increasing commercialisation and sophistication of language engineering products reinforces the need for tools and standards in support of a more cost-effective development and evaluation process than has been possible so far. This paper presents results of the MATE project which was launched in response to the need for standards and tools in support of creating, annotating, evaluating and exploiting spoken language resources. Focusing on the MATE workbench, we illustrate its functionality and usability through its use for markup of communication problems