How to create annotation units on dependent tiers

One of the main advantages of using a hierarchical structured tiers is the possibility to split the content of an annotation unit on a parent tier automatically into smaller parts on a child tier. E.g. the words on an utterance tier could be split into separate words. This is called tokenizing in Elan. These steps will guide you through this process:

  1. Go to Tier > Tokenize tier

  2. Select a Source (= parent) and Destination (= child) tier

  3. Optionally create a new destination tier by selecting Create New Tier…

  4. Select a delimiter. The default is a space, but other choices are possible (e.g. “-” for morpheme breaks).

  5. If the destination tier already contains annotation units, choose between overwriting or preserving them. If it’s still empty you can ignore this option.

  6. Select Create destination annotation for empty source annotation if you want to create for every source annotation a destination annotation, even if it’s empty.

    Figure 5.74. Tokenize tier

    Tokenize tier


  7. Click on Start, the tokenization will begin:

    Figure 5.75. Tokenization

    Tokenization


  8. When it is finished, you will see that every annotation unit from the source tier has been tokenized on the destination tier:

    Figure 5.76. Source and destination tier

    Source and destination tier


Even when tokenizing to a tier from the type time subdivision, all tokens (words in this example) on the destination tier have the same size (i.e. duration). In that case you probably want to adjust their length, as described in the section called “Changing the boundaries of an existing selection and annotation”.

For symbolic associations, there is no need to use the tokenizer. Instead, go to the grid viewer and make sure the checkbox next to the dropdown menu is selected. Now you can fill in the annotations of the symbolic associations in their column of the grid. See also the section called “The Grid Viewer”. If you want to copy or filter the contents from 1 tier to another symbolic associated tier, have a look at the section called “How to filter and copy tiers”.

Tabs and newline characters are always treated as delimiters.