Han Sloetjes


2014

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Improving the exploitation of linguistic annotations in ELAN
Onno Crasborn | Han Sloetjes
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

This paper discusses some improvements in recent and planned versions of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN, which are targeted at improving the usability of annotated files. Increased support for multilingual documents is provided, by allowing for multilingual vocabularies and by specifying a language per document, annotation layer (tier) or annotation. In addition, improvements in the search possibilities and the display of the results have been implemented, which are especially relevant in the interpretation of the results of complex multi-tier searches.

2012

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ELAN development, keeping pace with communities’ needs
Han Sloetjes | Aarthy Somasundaram
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription.

2011

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AVATecH: Audio/Video Technology for Humanities Research
Sebastian Tschöpel | Daniel Schneider | Rolf Bardeli | Oliver Schreer | Stefano Masneri | Peter Wittenburg | Han Sloetjes | Przemek Lenkiewicz | Eric Auer
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technologies for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

2010

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ELAN as Flexible Annotation Framework for Sound and Image Processing Detectors
Eric Auer | Albert Russel | Han Sloetjes | Peter Wittenburg | Oliver Schreer | S. Masnieri | Daniel Schneider | Sebastian Tschöpel
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

Annotation of digital recordings in humanities research still is, to a large extend, a process that is performed manually. This paper describes the first pattern recognition based software components developed in the AVATecH project and their integration in the annotation tool ELAN. AVATecH (Advancing Video/Audio Technology in Humanities Research) is a project that involves two Max Planck Institutes (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle) and two Fraunhofer Institutes (Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute, Berlin) and that aims to develop and implement audio and video technology for semi-automatic annotation of heterogeneous media collections as they occur in multimedia based research. The highly diverse nature of the digital recordings stored in the archives of both Max Planck Institutes, poses a huge challenge to most of the existing pattern recognition solutions and is a motivation to make such technology available to researchers in the humanities.

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LAT Bridge: Bridging Tools for Annotation and Exploration of Rich Linguistic Data
Marc Kemps-Snijders | Thomas Koller | Han Sloetjes | Huib Verwey
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

We present a software module, the LAT Bridge, which enables bidirectional communication between the annotation and exploration tools developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as part of our Language Archiving Technology (LAT) tool suite. These existing annotation and exploration tools enable the annotation, enrichment, exploration and archive management of linguistic resources. The user community has expressed the desire to use different combinations of LAT tools in conjunction with each other. The LAT Bridge is designed to cater for a number of basic data interaction scenarios between the LAT annotation and exploration tools. These interaction scenarios (e.g. bootstrapping a wordlist, searching for annotation examples or lexical entries) have been identified in collaboration with researchers at our institute. We had to take into account that the LAT tools for annotation and exploration represent a heterogeneous application scenario with desktop-installed and web-based tools. Additionally, the LAT Bridge has to work in situations where the Internet is not available or only in an unreliable manner (i.e. with a slow connection or with frequent interruptions). As a result, the LAT Bridge’s architecture supports both online and offline communication between the LAT annotation and exploration tools.

2008

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An Exchange Format for Multimodal Annotations
Thomas Schmidt | Susan Duncan | Oliver Ehmer | Jeffrey Hoyt | Michael Kipp | Dan Loehr | Magnus Magnusson | Travis Rose | Han Sloetjes
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

This paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation of multimodality. We propose a multimodal annotation exchange format, based on the annotation graph formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools.

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Annotation by Category: ELAN and ISO DCR
Han Sloetjes | Peter Wittenburg
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

The Data Category Registry is one of the ISO initiatives towards the establishment of standards for Language Resource management, creation and coding. Successful application of the DCR depends on the availability of tools that can interact with it. This paper describes the first steps that have been taken to provide users of the multimedia annotation tool ELAN, with the means to create references from tiers and annotations to data categories defined in the ISO Data Category Registry. It first gives a brief description of the capabilities of ELAN and the structure of the documents it creates. After a concise overview of the goals and current state of the ISO DCR infrastructure, a description is given of how the preliminary connectivity with the DCR is implemented in ELAN.

2006

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ELAN: a Professional Framework for Multimodality Research
Peter Wittenburg | Hennie Brugman | Albert Russel | Alex Klassmann | Han Sloetjes
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

Utilization of computer tools in linguistic research has gained importance with the maturation of media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and video. The increased use of these tools in gesture, sign language and multimodal interaction studies has led to stronger requirements on the flexibility, the efficiency and in particular the time accuracy of annotation tools. This paper describes the efforts made to make ELAN a tool that meets these requirements, with special attention to the developments in the area of time accuracy. In subsequent sections an overview will be given of other enhancements in the latest versions of ELAN that makes it a useful tool in multimodality research.