Tags in the cloud : Crowdsourcing semantic annotation with CATMA

Jan Christoph MeisterUniversity of Hamburg

www.catma.de

CATMA - an integrated textual markup and analysis tool

29.10.2012 2CLARIN's Turn Towards The Literary Text

Text vs. sentence, or: What‘s so different about processing texts?• structural complexity: min TEXT > 2 (SENTENCE)

• structural activity: TEXT processing actualizes paradigmatic cross-reference across sentences

• structural dynamic: TEXT processing represents & simulates cognitive and empirical processes

29.10.2012 CLARIN's Turn Towards The Literary Text 3

TEXT yields more INTERPRETATIONS than SENTENCE

+CONTINGENCY: The more complex & dynamic structure, when activated during processing, results in a higher degree of contingency in functional „outcome“

The what and why of MarkUp procedural, descriptive & discursive

function

• discursive markup: enables human readers to interpret a text and to explore its hermeneutic potential in collaboration „What might this text mean to us?“

• declarative markup: informs a human reader how to process a text as a communicative device „How is this text put together and how does it function in its communicative universe?“

• procedural markup: instructs a (natural or artificial) text processor how to handle a text as a structured character string „What is the correct operation to perfom on this input?“


performative function

discursive function

Hermeneutic „must haves“ of discursive markup

facilitate collaboration & non-deterministic annotation

allow for multiple markup allow for overlap allow for concurrent tagging

conceptualize markup as dynamic & recursive

allow for extensibility allow for multiple (and even contradictory) markup seamlessly integrate markup and analysis & support the hermeneutic loop


MarkUp types & data models


There is no such thing as “no-mark up”. (Coombs, Renear, DeRose 1987)

opaqueimplicit

<SentenceStart>There</SentenceStart> is no such thing as “no-mark up.”

linearinline, deterministic

<SentenceStart><Adverb>There</Adverb></SentenceStart> is no such thing as “no-mark up”.

nested inline,deterministic sequential

There is no such thing as ”no-mark up”.

<1,5, word class = “Adverb”><1,5, segment = “SentenceStart”><1,5, POS = “verb phrase element”>

relationalstand off, descriptive

<1,5, word class = “Adverb”><1,38, speech act = “declaration”><1,11, POS = “verb phrase”>

There is no such thing as “no-mark up”.

<1,5, word class = “Preposition”><1,5, segment = “SentenceStart”><1,8, POS = “noun phrase”> network

stand off, discursive

Implementation in CATMA


www.catma.de

The CATMA/CLÉA approach to markup

text range based model a tag references a text range with a start and an

end offset external standoff markup

markup is stored in external files or data bases to facilitate tagging and exchange of markup by multiple users

markup is stored in a standoff manner to allow overlapping

markup tolerates non-deterministic tagging & supports analytical operations that exploit semantic ambiguity


Example for overlapping markup in CATMA


(NB: In CATMA tag sets can be imported/exported; tags can be created / manipulated ad hoc during mark up)

TEI feature structure tag declaration & overlapping markup

<fs xml:id="CATMA_d7251f99-14e9-4c36-8ff7-24058ae81ce5" n="1_7985fdf0-77a5-4060-9a3d-2d977e0ab954" type="catma_tag">

<f xml:id="CATMA_aa9b3727-187e-4fb8-9990-e7880912a409" name="catma_tagname">

<string>Keynote_speaker&affiliation</string>

</f>

<f xml:id="CATMA_564825ba-28b2-4dab-b136-b87c8a3d9e28" name="catma_displaycolor">

<numeric value="-13421569"/>

</f>

</fs>


<ptr target="Abstracts.doc#range( /.21736, /.21888)" type="inclusion"/>

<seg ana="#CATMA_0a252cc2-96d2-4ed4-8fb8-52380550ec0b #CATMA_d7251f99-14e9-4c36-8ff7-24058ae81ce5 #CATMA_8513fe2d-2e35-4d0a-a3a2-07528bcfa012">

Question 1: How can we model a collaborative mark up practice?


Answer 1: CATMA’S “n-meta-data set to-1 object data instance”-model


meta-data•procedural•declarative•hermeneutic

object-data

Question 2: But how, on top of that, can we also model the recursive routines that characterize the humanistic workflow?


Example for recursion: a simple querie across the object data/meta data divide


Step 1: object data querie

Step 2: refinement by adding ...

... an additional meta-data constraint

... which is why (reg="\b\S*\Qez\E(?=\W)") where (tag="Keynote_speaker&affiliation") generates this:


Answer 2: CATMA’S dynamic data model, e.g. (n meta-data set to 1 object instance)>n+1


meta-data•procedural•declarative•hermeneutic

object-data

object-data

Question 3: How can we implement this practice in a system?


Answer 3: Call the big sister – CLÉA!


CLÉA Data Base Model

CATMA/CLÉA: User and resource administration


Manage corpora & source documents, markup collections and tag libraries


Annotate texts or corpora using pre-defined or ready-made tags


Build and execute queries on source text & tags, or any combination thereof


Visualize results


What’s in it for CLARIN?

• Import any text or corpus into CATMA/CLÉA• Run standard analytical procedures automatically

or inter actively on upload (indexing, POS tagging etc.)

• Annotate and analyse texts or corpora collaboratively

• Share and export markup from the CATMA/CLÉA data base in multiple formats

CLÉA = Collaborative Literature Éxploration and Annotation



Mille grazie to my CATMA/CLÉA development team

• Evelyn Gius• Malte Meister• Marco Petris• Lena Schüch

and to our funders

• University of Hamburg (2009)• Google DH Awards (2010-2013)• BMBF (2013-2016)

Tag definition

<fsDecl xml:id="CATMA_TAG_ID_1"

type="test"

baseTypes="catma_tag">

<fsDescr>test - Test Tag</fsDescr>

<fDecl xml:id="CATMA_TAG_DEF_1_PROP_1"

name="catma_displaycolor"

optional="false">

<vRange><numeric value="-13408513"/></vRange>

</fDecl>

<fDecl xml:id="CATMA_TAG_DEF_1_PROP_2" name="user_defined_test_property"

optional="false">

<vRange><string/></vRange>

</fDecl>

</fsDecl>

each Tag can haveadditional user defined properties

each Tag has a type

each Tag has a color


Tag instance

<fs xml:id="CATMA_TAG_INSTANCE_1" type="test">

<f xml:id="CATMA_PROPERTY_1_1" name="catma_displaycolor">

<numeric value="-13408513"/>

</f>

<f xml:id="CATMA_PROPERTY_1_2" name="user_defined_test_property">

<string>instance specific test value</string>

</f></fs>

a Tag instance can have individual values for the user defined properties

each Tag instance is of a type


Tag referencing

<seg ana="#CATMA_TAG_INSTANCE_1">

<ptr target="mytext_utf8.txt#char=36168,36185" type="inclusion"/>

</seg>

The content of a range is referenced by a pointer to an external entity.

The URI is based on the RFC 5147 for pointing to plain text.


Potential problems and possible solutions

referencing ranges based on character offsets are vulnerable to modifications of the content• possible solution: automated adjustments with

checksums and context information, and• track versioning and revision history in the source

document header

the encoding of the tags is machine readable but not interoperable out of the box possible solution: defining the feature structure

encoding of tags in terms of the open annotation framework


Documents

Tags in the cloud : Crowdsourcing semantic annotation with CATMA