Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) file


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ELAN can import documents from the SIL Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). This involves a few steps:

Click File > Import > FLEx File.... Select the .flextext file and relevant media files by clicking the ...-buttons.
In the import window select the .flextext file exported from FLEx. Optionally also add media files here (if not already in your .flextext file). There are several options to customize the import:
- Include "interlinear-text" element: the top-level interlinear-text element can contain a title and other information. If selected, these will be converted to one or more tiers.
- Include "paragraph" element: a text may contain multiple paragraph elements, each containing one or more phrases. If selected, this option allows to ignore the paragraph layer when importing.
- Import participant information from "Note" field: if the FLEx file contains a note item type containing the name or code of the participant/spaeaker, this option makes that it will be stored in a tier's partipant attribute.
- Smallest time-alignable element: when the word element is selected here, the time-alignment for that level will be lost when exported again from ELAN to FLEx. In .flextext time alignment is stored on the phrase level.
- Specify the top-level "phrase" item type: by default the <item type="txt">...</item> child element is converted to the parent tier of each level. Here it is possible to specify an alternative for the phrase level, e.g. segnum.
- Use the "speaker" attribute as tier prefix: by default tier hierarchies for different speakers in the file are prefixed in ELAN with A, B, C etc. This option allows to specify that the contents of the speaker attribute of a phrase element should be used instead. Note that this can interfere with the conversion, the encoding and decoding, from tier name to .flextext element.
It is possible to have tier types created simply for all major elements (phrase, word, morph etc.) or, more fine-grained, for each combination of major element plus item type up to a combination of major element, the type and the language.
Finally, set a duration per phrase element in milliseconds. This has to be set if the FLEx export files do not contain timestamps. When importing a FLEx file that was edited in ELAN before and exported as a .flextext file, time duration information has already been stored in the file.

Figure 68. Import FLEx file

Figure 69. FLEx to ELAN structure

The tier structure created after import in ELAN is roughly like in the example above. The mapping of the FLEx structure onto ELAN tiers follows the schema: <Speaker>_<element>-<item-type>-<language> Where the Speaker prefix is a generic label (A, B, C, ...).

FLEx tiers and their representation in .flextext:

Word	<word>	<item type=”txt”>
Morphemes	<morph>	<item type=”txt”>
Lex. Entries	<morph>	<item type=”cf”>
	<morph>	<item type=”hn”>
Lex. Gloss	<morph>	<item type=”gls”>
Lex. Gram.	<morph>	<item type=”msa”>
Word Gloss	<word>	<item type="gls">
Word Cat.	<word>	<item type=”pos”>

	Note
	On the third-party resources page of ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan/thirdparty ), you can find a workflow description covering importing from FLEx to ELAN and back to FLEx.