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DitAT : A flexible web-based dialogue annotation tool

Introduction

DitAT is a tool that allows to annotate transcripts or texts with (supportive) audio playback. It can be used on several platforms such as MS Windows and GNU/Linux and provides a simple and user-friendly graphical user interface. The tool allows for context-sensitive help for the annotation classes, allows commenting on utterance annotations and offers the possibility of audio playback of dialogue fragments if audio is available. For data input and output, it supports both tab-separated fields in plain text (for easy pre and post processing1) and XML formatted data (including standoff markup). The annotation program interface of the most recent version looks as follows:
For more details on the annotation tool, see [1].

The annotation program

In order for the tool to be able to execute, a recent version of the Java Runtime Environment should be present. To start the annotation program, download the following file: 

DIT Annotation Tool v0.8 (DitAT.jar, 56 KB)

When working under M$ Windows, double click on the JAR file to start the tool. If this does not launch the application, then put the following file in the same location as the JAR file: 

DitAT execution script (DitAT.bat, 1 KB)
and double-click it. For Non-M$ Windows users, assuming that Java runtime is installed, execute the application by typing: 

java -jar DitAT.jar
on the command line.

Quick start

To get an idea how the dialogue tool works, load an example session in the annotation tool, select File -> Open Session... and copy-paste the URL of the dialogue session file below in the URL field. 

http://www.cosmion.net/jeroen/software/ditat/example1.session.xml

This example session loads a dialogue fragment from the HCRC Map Task Corpus (spontaneous speech) and loads the DIT++ tagset. The example session specifies the annotation output as XML to the local file system.

For details about configuration, defining sessions, file formats, and using web-based annotation, see [2]. For any feedback or requests, please feel free to contact me.

References

[2] Jeroen Geertzen (2006). Dit Annotation Tool User Manual. Technical Report, Tilburg University, nov.