To improve consistency an annotator can use a controlled vocabulary (CV). From a CV an entry can be selected that serves as annotation value. Sometimes, however, it is not immediately clear what CV entry should be selected given a certain media fragment. In that case looking up a proposed annotation in a relevant lexicon could help to make a decision. ELAN enables the user to perform lookups in lexica through the following steps:
Set up a new Lexicon Service (see the section called “Setting up a Lexicon Service”).
Enhance a Linguistic Type so that it's tiers can do a lexicon lookup (sec the section called “Set the Lexicon Service and entry field information for a Linguistic Type”).
Perform the lookup (see the section called “Perform a Lexicon Lookup”).
A Lexicon Service is in essence a link to a certain lexicon that is hosted on a certain lexicon server. That means that for a user to be able to connect to a lexicon, he needs to connect to the server and subsequently select one of the available lexica. You can either add a new lexicon or Import an existing one. To add a new lexicon do the following:
In the main menu select
In the Edit Lexicon Services click
On the first page of the dialog that now appears..
Enter a name that is later used to refer to this Lexicon Service.
Select the Lexicon Server Type.
Enter the URL of the lexicon server.
Enter your username and password for the lexicon server.
Click
On the second page of the dialog select the lexicon you wish to connect to. The bottom half of the page will contain the description of the lexicon.
Click
A new Lexicon Service will appear in the drop down list of the Edit Lexicon Service dialog. Click
to close this dialog.To import a lexicon do the following:
In the Edit Lexicon Services click
The following dialog window will appear:
Once you have selected a service name from the list, you can either click
to delete it, or to import it. The service name will now be displayed in the Edit Lexicon Service window and you can now add it (see steps 2-6 above).Before an annotation can be used for a lexicon lookup, the linguistic type of the tier must have a reference to a Lexicon Service. In addition, there must be a reference to the field of an entry that is of interest. To set this information for a linguistic type, do the following:
In the main menu select
Select the a linguistic type in the pull down menu Select Type.
Next to Lexicon Connection click
Select a Lexicon Service in the drop down list at the top of the dialog.
A list of fields that compose a lexical entry is requested from the lexicon server and shown in the table. Select one.
Click
In the Change Type dialog the Lexicon Service name and Lexical Entry Field name
are shown. Click to commit to the new Lexicon
settings.
If the linguistic type of a tier is enhanced with lexicon service and entry field information, lexicon lookups using the annotations of that tier can be performed:
Open the Lexicon Entry tab in main ELAN window.
Select an annotation on a tier of which the linguistic type is enhanced with a lexicon service and entry field information.
In the Lexicon Entry tab the annotation is entered in the field Annotation and the button is enabled to indicate a lookup is possible.
Select a constraint from the drop down list.
Click the
button.A lookup is performed and the results are presented on the right side of the tab in the form of a tree structure.
Open an entry and subsequent entry nodes by clicking the open icon in front of a node (if there is one).
If a node value consist of a URL, selecting the node will open the URL in your default browser.
If you select the top node of an entry, the
button is enabled to indicate that you can use the value of the entry field as value of the active annotation. Click this button to do so.