How to define a tier and its attributes

ELAN offers the following options:

Adding new tiers

Do the following to add a new tier:

  1. Click on Tier > Add New Tier.... The Add Tier dialog window appears.

  2. Define the tier attributes:

    Figure 5.13. Tier attributes

    Tier attributes


Enter the following information:

  1. Go to Tier name. Enter the tier name.

    The tier name is the name that is displayed in the Timeline, Interlinear and Subtitle Viewer.

  2. Go to Participant. Enter the name of the participant whose utterance is being transcribed.

  3. Go to Parent tier. Select a parent tier from the pull-down menu.

    • If the tier has no parent tier, select none.

    • Otherwise select the appropriate parent tier.

  4. Go to Linguistic type. Select a linguistic type from the predefined list in the pull-down menu (see the section called “How to define a linguistic type”).

    Note

    The 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”).

  5. Go to Default Language. Select the default character set from the pull-down menu or select None. If None 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.

  6. Click the More Options... button if you want 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 Browse..., selecting a color or font and clicking OK. 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. To apply the new color and font click Apply. The following dialog window will then appear:

In the upper part of the window you can select the attribute settings you whish to apply, i.e. Tier, Color, Tier, Highlight and Tier Font. In the bottom part of the window you can decide to change the preferred attribute settings for multiple tiers in one action, i.e. by selecting all tiers of the same type, or all depending tiers, or all tiers with the same participant. Finally click Add to save the tier and its attributes. Otherwise click Cancel to exit the window without saving.

Importing tiers

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:

  1. Select Tier > Add new tier…

  2. Click on the Import tab

  3. Click on Browse…

  4. Select the eaf or etf file from which you want to import a tier and confirm your choice by clicking on Select

  5. Finally click on Import.

Figure 5.14. Import tiers

Import tiers


Note

If you import a linguistic type that already exists, a postfix like –cp1 or –cp2 will be added to the imported version.

Creating a tier using the Audio Recognizer

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”).

Figure 5.15. Audio Recognizer

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 Add Channel1 (or Add Channel2 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 Remove 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 Start button to start the recognition. During the recognition you can click Cancel 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.

Note

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 Create Tier(s)... in the 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 Create button to create the tier.

If 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 Create 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).

Changing tier attributes

Do one of the following to change the attributes of an already existing tier:

  1. Use the mouse.

    1. In the Timeline Viewer, right-click at about the height of the tier that you want to change. A pull-down menu appears.

    2. In the pull-down menu, click on Change tier attributes. The Change tier attributes dialog window for that tier appears.

      Figure 5.16. Timeline context menu

      Timeline context menu


    3. Change the tier attributes in the dialog that now appears and confirm by clicking on Change.

      Figure 5.17. Change tier attributes

      Change tier attributes


      Note

      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”).

  2. Use the Tier menu.

    1. Click on Tier menu.

    2. Go to Change tier attributes…

    3. Click on the drop down box and select the tier which attributes you want to change. The Change tier attributes dialog window for that tier appears.

    4. After making the changes, click on Change to save them. Otherwise click Cancel to exit the window without saving.

    Figure 5.18. Tier menu

    Tier menu


Besides the options in the dialog window Change tier attributes there are three more options that can be reached by clicking on the More Options... button. In the new dialog window you can change tier name color, tier highlight color (painted as background color) and tier font by clicking Browse..., selecting a color or font and clicking OK. To apply the new color and font click Apply. A window for changing tier attributes settings for multiple tiers will then appear, please see the section called “Adding new tiers” for more details.

Deleting tiers

Do one of the following to delete a tier:

  1. Use the mouse.

    1. In the Timeline Viewer, right-click at about the height of the tier that you want to delete. A pull-down menu appears.

    2. In the pull-down menu, click on Delete tier.

      Figure 5.19. Timeline context menu

      Timeline context menu


    3. A warning dialog appears asking you to confirm the deletion (see below).

  2. Use the Tier menu.

    1. Click on Tier menu.

    2. Go to Delete tier… A dialog window appears.

    3. The labels of all available tiers are displayed a pull down box, e.g.:

      Figure 5.20. Delete tier

      Delete tier


    4. Click on the tier that you want to delete. To select multiple tiers and delete them in one action, select the tiers you want to delete (either by browsing through them with the mouse, or using the control or shift key), in the pull down box in the delete tier dialog window. A warning dialog appears asking you to confirm the deletion., e.g.:

      Figure 5.21. Deleting tier confirmation

      Deleting tier confirmation


    5. Click Yes to delete the tier/s and all its child tiers; click No to not delete them.

    Note

    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”.

Merging tiers

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 File > Merge Transcriptions.... To get the annotations of both tiers onto one tier, use Tier > Merge Tiers.... In the dialog window select the two tiers to merge and click Next. Enter a name for the new tier and select the desired linguistic type. Now select Concatenate the values of overlapping annotations and click Finish 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 Tier > Merge Tiers..., select the two tiers to merge and click Next. After entering a name for the new tier and selecting the desired linguistic type, select Set the duration over the overlap as the annotation's value and the desired time format. Finally click Finish. 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”.)

As 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 Merge Tiers... option to achieve this.

Merging tier groups

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 Tier > Merge Tier Groups... and select the two independent tiers to be merged. After clicking Next, 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 Finish.

Changing the parent of a tier

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 Tier > Change parent of tier… menu.

Note

Though an undo option is available it still is a good idea to make a backup of your files before proceeding.

Table 5.3. Change parent of tier wizard


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:

Figure 5.22. Dependent to independent tier

Dependent to 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.

Add New Participant

ELAN offers the possibility to create a new set of tiers for a new participant based on an already existing set of tiers. The new set is either based on an existing tier with all its depending tiers or on all tiers with a specific participant attribute. The prefix or suffix of the new tier names will replace the prefix or suffix of the existing tiers and the participant attribute will be set to the new participant. To add a new participant click on Tier > Add New Participant.... The following Add new participant dialog window appears: