Backbone Annotator Essentials

What can you do with BACKBONE Annotator?

BACKBONE Annotator is a tool that assists annotators in their process of manual annotation of texts based on SACODEYL Annotator (Pérez-Paredes & Alcaraz, 2009).

BACKBONE Annotator allows for the management of multiple corpus files and corpora, an underlying principle in BACKBONE. Users can create, import or select different corpora and perform the same or different annotation schemes on each of them. Users may work on texts of different nature, spoken or written, monologic or dialogic.

The tool uses UNICODE standard, which gives it truly multilingual power.

BACKBONE Annotator reads text files coded in different standards: ANSI, ASCII, ISO, UFT-8 and Unicode.

Managing a corpus

Run the application. This is the welcome screen. On the left, we can find the annotation taxonomy area that will be used by the annotator(s). On the right, we find the annotation area. Right now, both areas are empty.

The first step towards annotating a text or a group of texts is to create a corpus file. By creating this, the user will define a corpus name holder for the group of texts that she is annotating.

In the context of BACKBONE, these groupings are connected with different languages: EFL, French, German, Irsig English, Polish, Spanish Turkish. To create a corpus, click the corpus menu and then select new corpus file. The following dialogue will prompt the users to define a set of features that characterise their corpus. These fields help users define some of the most common meta data for texts included in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Although most of them are optional, two of them are of the utmost importance: the name of the corpus and the file name and storing path. Once we have defined our corpus file name and decided where to store it, we can start annotating.

Annotation taxonimies and categories

In the context of BACKBONE, every corpus has a unique taxonomy. A taxonomy is the tree structure that is made of an extensible and open number of categories established by the annotator or group of annotators. Each taxonomy reflects the intention and purpose of a corpus. BACKBONE Annotator uses a default taxonomy tree that can be changed by users. Note that the categories may contain children categories that may contain further children categories and so on.

Managing categories

These are the options available to manage the categories of a taxonomy tree. To add an upper level category, select "Taxonomies" or an existing category and then simply click the "Add Category" button.

It is important than you make sure that the Category ID field is correct and no blank spaces, symbols (€,@,etc) are included. To delete a category, select a category and then click the Delete Category button. If you delete a category that has children, these children will be deleted too, so be careful with this function. You may also want to restructure the way taxonomies are arranged. Select a taxonomy and then click Up Category or Down Category. You may want to change some of the propierties of a category while retaining it, for example, its name or its colour. To do this, right-double-click the icon on the left of the category.