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 another tier. This can be a child tier, but also an independent tier, outside
of
a hierarchy. 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:
- Go to Tier > Tokenize tier
- Select a Source (= parent) and Destination tier
- Optionally create a new destination tier by selecting Create New
Tier…
- Select a delimiter. The default is a space, but other choices are possible (e.g.
“-” for morpheme breaks).
- If you would like punctuation symbols tokenized as well, please specify them in
the field next to 'Punctuation tokens'.
- If the destination tier already contains annotation units, choose between
overwriting or preserving them. If its still empty you can ignore this
option.
- Select Create destination annotation for empty source
annotation if you want to create for every source annotation a
destination annotation, even if its empty.
Figure 2.111. Tokenize tier
- Click on Start, the tokenization will begin:
Figure 2.112. Tokenization
- When it is finished, you will see that every annotation unit from the source
tier has been tokenized on the destination tier:
Figure 2.113. Source and destination tier
All tokens (words in this example) on the destination tier have the same
size (i.e. duration), even when tokenizing to a tier from the type time subdivision.
You
can adjust their length, as described in 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 Grid Viewer. If you want to copy or filter the contents from 1
tier to another symbolic associated tier, have a look at How to filter and copy tiers.
Tabs and newline characters are always treated as delimiters.