ELAN offers several ways to interact with web services. These web services are tools or applications that run on a web server, accept some resource(s) as input, apply an algorithm and return the result as output. Some of the Recognizers in the Audio And Video Recognizers tab are available as a web service, in which case audio or video or any other type of sequential data are uploaded to be processed online. The web services available in this menu work with text rather than multimedia content. These tools can automate certain parts of the annotation process, such as tokenizing and part of speech tagging. These web services can be found by clicking Options > Web Services . The next section describes the web service WebLicht.

WebLicht

WebLicht (Web-Based Linguistic Chaining Tool) is an execution environment developed at Tuebingen University as part of the CLARIN infrastructure. Most of the tools in this environment perform NLP (Natural Language Processing) type of tasks on textual data and most of them are tailored to work with language data in one of the well-described and well-resourced languages. The tools are encapsulated as web services and can be combined into processing chains.

To make use of the WebLicht service, go to Options > Web Services > Weblicht. In the dialog that opens, you can specify how to use WebLicht

Figure 2.127. WebLicht service: upload plain text or the contents of a tier

WebLicht service: upload plain text or the contents of a tier

Then click the Next button.

The interface of the second step depends on the choice between plain text and tier(s) in the first step.

Then click Next.

The third step depends on the choice between a tool chain and a single tool in the first step.

After configuration with a tool chain file or a single tool, click Finish to start processing. When the processing was successful, you will see a dialog stating the operation is complete. Depending on the service you selected for processing, the tokenized sentence and/or part of speech tags will be added as children of the tier you selected for processing.

Figure 2.133. WebLicht service: result of the processing

WebLicht service: result of the processing

Parser used: Berkeley NLP Parser

WebLicht with tool chain file

The recommended way to use WebLicht from within ELAN is by supplying a preconfigured tool chain file. This file can be created as follows: