ELAN offers the following options:
adding a new tier (the section called “Adding new tiers”);
changing the tier attributes (the section called “Changing tier attributes”);
deleting a tier (the section called “Deleting tiers”).
Do the following to add a new tier:
Enter the following information:
Go to
. Enter the tier name.The tier name is the name that is displayed in the Timeline, Interlinear and Subtitle Viewer.
Go to
. Enter the name of the participant whose utterance is being transcribed.Go to
. Select a parent tier from the pull-down menu.If the tier has no parent tier, select none.
Otherwise select the appropriate parent tier.
Go to the section called “How to define a linguistic type”).
. Select a linguistic type from the predefined list in the pull-down menu (seeThe list of possible linguistic types is dependent on the parent tier that is chosen. E.g., if there is no parent tier ("none" in the pull down menu), the linguistic types to choose from are of the stereotype "none" (see the section called “How to define a linguistic type”).
Go to
. Select the default character set from the pull-down menu or select . If is selected, no language will be saved in the tier setting. This means that the system's default language will always be used for this tier.Whenever you enter or change annotations on that tier, the text entry box is automatically preconfigured for the default character set.
Click the
button if you would like to change the color of the tier name and the font of the annotations. In the new dialog window you can change them by clicking , selecting a color or font and clicking . To apply the new color and font click .The color chooser has four tabs. The last three contain different ways to choose a color, which is subsequently displayed in the lower part of the window. In the first tab you can add or insert the color displayed below and you can copy, paste and delete the selected color. The list of favorite colors is saved and used the next time you start ELAN.
Finally click
to save the tier and its attributes. Otherwise click to exit the window without saving.You can reuse the tiers (together with their linguistic types) you created before in other eaf or etf (templates, see the section called “Saving a template”) files:
Select
Click on the
tabClick on
Select the eaf or etf file from which you want to import a tier and confirm your choice by clicking on
Finally click on
.If you import a linguistic type that already exists, a postfix like –cp1 or –cp2 will be added to the imported version.
As from version 3.6 ELAN offers the possibility to create tiers based on the output of an audio recognizer. A simple silence recognizer that comes with ELAN will show how to use an audio recognizer in ELAN. The recognizer can determine segments of silence in an audio signal based on examples given by the user. To use it for segmenting the audio first open the tab Audio Recognizer in the main ELAN window. Choose the appropriate recognizer from the pull down menu at the top of the tab, in this case Silence Recognizer (see also Figure 5.15, “Audio Recognizer”).
The Silence Recognizer uses examples to determine what is silence and what is not. To give the recognizer an example first select a part of the audio that is silence (see also the section called “Making a selection”). Then click on (or if there is a second channel and that is the channel in focus) in the Audio Recognizer tab. The begin and end times of the example are shown in the list beneath the Add Channel buttons. By selecting a line in the list and clicking an example can be removed. By double clicking a line in the list the associated time interval is selected in ELAN.
After giving sufficient examples, click on the
button to start the recognition. During the recognition you can click to stop the recognition.The result of the recognition is a segmentation in the Waveform Viewer for each channel for which an example is given. In the case of the silence recognizer the segments are either labeled 's' for the beginning of a silent segment or 'x' for the beginning of a non-silent segment. If you are not satisfied with the segmentation, you can change the examples or the duration parameters and start a new recognition.
The second and subsequent runs of the audio recognizer can be several times faster than the first run. This is caused by the buffering the audio recognizer applies.
If the labeling is correct, you can create a tier with annotations reflecting the labeling in the Waveform Viewer. Click on Audio Recognizer tab. On the tab Per Segmentation of the dialog window select the channel that has the segmentation you want to use from the pull down menu. In the table Select and configure segments first select the labels that must be included in the tier. If necessary, change the label by clicking in the third column of a label and enter a new label. Check the Number segments column if you want to number each annotation with a particular label. The number will be appended to the label. Finally, click the button to create the tier.
in theIf all segment labels are to be used, open the All Segmentations tab instead of the Per Segmentation tab. On the All Segmentations tab you are only asked to select the channels for which a tier must be created. Again, clicking the button will make ELAN create the tier.
The controls we have seen so far are common for all recognizers. There are also controls that are specific for a recognizer. These controls can be found in the right half of the Audio Recognizer tab. In the case of the silence recognizer there are two sliders: Minimal Silence Duration and Minimal Non Silence Duration. When using another recognizer, these sliders are replaced by the controls implemented by that recognizer.
To learn more about creating and adding other recognizers, please read the relevant section on the Source Release Notes page (http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/src-release-notes.html).
Do one of the following to change the attributes of an already existing tier:
Use the mouse.
In the Timeline Viewer, right-click at about the height of the tier that you want to change. A pull-down menu appears.
In the pull-down menu, click on
. The dialog window for that tier appears.Change the tier attributes in the dialog that now appears and confirm by clicking on
.You can’t change the Parent Tier nor the Linguistic type in this dialog because of possible data loss this alterations would cause. To change these settings in a safe way (i.e. creating a copy of the tier and changing this copy) see the section called “Changing tier attributes” and the section called “Changing the parent of a tier”).
Use the Tier menu.
Click on
menu.Go to
Click on the drop down box and select the tier which attributes you want to change. The
dialog window for that tier appears.After making the changes, click on
to save them. Otherwise click to exit the window without saving.Besides the options in the dialog window Change tier attributes there are three more options that can be reached by clicking on the button. In the new dialog window you can change tier name color, tier highlight color (painted as background color) and tier font by clicking , selecting a color or font and clicking . To apply the new color and font click .
Do one of the following to delete a tier:
Use the mouse.
Use the Tier menu.
Click on
menu.Go to
A dialog window appears.The labels of all available tiers are displayed a pull down box, e.g.:
Click on the tier that you want to delete. A warning dialog appears asking you to confirm the deletion., e.g.:
Click
to delete the tier and all its child tiers; click to not delete them.If you delete a tier, you will lose all its annotations.
If you delete a parent tier, all its child tiers will be automatically deleted as well. Please make sure that you do not accidentally delete a child tier.
To delete a parent tier without deleting its child tiers, you have to assign the child tier to another parent or make it an independent tier. Afterwards you can safely remove the parent tier. For instructions on how to change a tier’s parent, see the section called “Changing the parent of a tier”.
ELAN offers the possibility to merge two tiers. There are
several reasons why you would want to merge tiers. For instance, one
could think of a situation where two people are transcribing
different parts of the same media file. If both people have
finished, the transcriptions can be merged via Concatenate the values of overlapping annotations
and click to create the new tier. Now
all annotations of the original tiers are on the new tier.
Overlapping annotations are merged to one annotation. The merged
annotations begins where the first of the overlapping annotations
begins and ends where the last one ends. The values of the
overlapping annotations are concatenated.
When checking the option Only process if the overlapping annotations have the same value, Elan only merges annotations that have the same value. In this case, the values of both annotations are not concatenated, so the created annotation contains the value only once. Optionally you can specify the value the merging annotations should have.
Merging tiers can also be used to get some time statistics of the combination of two tiers. Again, select Set the duration over the overlap as the annotation's value and the desired time format. Finally click . Overlapping annotations are merged and the annotation's value is the total duration of the overlapping annotations. (More about annotations statistics can be found in the section called “Annotations Statistics”.)
, select the two tiers to merge and click . After entering a name for the new tier and selecting the desired linguistic type, selectAs a final example, consider an audio recognizer (see the section called “Creating a tier using the Audio Recognizer”) creating not one but multiple tiers. If you want to put the annotations of those tiers on one tier, you could use the option to achieve this.
In ELAN it is possible to merge a tier group (an independent tier and all of its dependent tiers) with another tier group and put the result in a new tier group. The names of the tiers in the new group are the names of the tiers in the first group with a suffix entered by the user. The mapping of tiers is based on name patterns. For instance, the tier W-RGph is mapped onto K-RGph, but not onto K-Spch.
To merge two tier groups, click in the main menu on
and select the two independent tiers to be merged. After clicking , enter a suffix that is to be concatenated to the tier names of the first tier group for the naming of the new tier group and click .Previous versions of ELAN offered an option to change the parent of a tier. As this operation could cause data loss when not performed carefully, this function has been disabled. However, what can be done now as an alternative is making a copy of a tier and altering that copy. This prevents the possible loss of data, as the original tier stays the same. At the same time the linguistic type of the copy can be changed as well. In order to maintain the overview during this potentially complicated operation a wizard guides you through this process, which can be started via the
menu.Though an undo option is available it still is a good idea to make a backup of your files before proceeding.
As the result of this process the selected tier (and its children) will be copied and they will become dependent upon the newly chosen parent tier. In our example the W-Words tier, previously a child of W-Spch, became an independent tier:
Note that as the tier is not moved but copied the names
have been changed: a postfix “-cp” has been added to the copies. The
original can be deleted afterwards if you are satisfied with the
result of the operation, while the copies can be renamed to reflect
the original tier names.
If you decide to assign a tier to a different parent tier, ELAN will automatically align its annotations with that of the new parent tier (based on overlapping time intervals). In this case, if there is an annotation on the referring tier, but no overlapping annotation on the parent tier, ELAN will delete this annotation. Be very careful that you do not lose such annotations accidentally. A referring tier can be turned into an independent time-alignable tier without any problem.