Table of Contents
The ELAN tool allows you:
To search for text, do the following:
You can always make use of regular expressions to conduct your searches when “regular expression” is checked. (see Appendix A, REGULAR EXPRESSION SEARCH for the regular expression syntax).
By default the search is not case sensitive. To change this, select the “case sensitive” checkbox.
Optionally, specify the interval to search in (from ... s …ms to … s … ms). Make a choice between searching within a time interval and finding annotations that overlap with a certain interval. Click on Add new constraint to add a second tier and search item. Up to 10 constraints can be used. There exist 2 kinds of them:
For example: annotations contained in a structural distance of –1 to 2 tx-annotations from trees on the tier tx are sees, trees, and, flowers.
Table 7.1. Annotation example
tier | annotations | |||||||
st (sentence) | He sees trees and flowers. | |||||||
tx (word) | he | sees | trees | and | flowers | |||
mb (morpheme break) | … | see | -s | tree | -s | … | flower | -s |
ps (part of speech) | … | V | SUF | N | SUF | … | N | SUF |
It is possible to search on different tiers within one annotation. For example, the search parameters illustrated below search for all annotations on the tier tx, which contain “-s” in one of their morpheme breaks and “N” in one of their parts of speech. (Both “-s” and “N” are in distance of “0 words”, i.e., they occur within the same word as specified on the tier tx.) I.e., these parameters would find “trees” and “flowers” in the above example, but not “sees”.
Another option is searching for sequences of utterances, words or other annotations on the same tier, e.g.:
You can delete the second (or third) search item. Click on
Delete last constraint to delete it.
You only need this option if you want to select a non-default character set. The box automatically displays the default set of the selected tier (see Changing tier attributes).
After you have specified your search parameters, click OK to start the search process.
Make sure the box next to Regular Expression is checked when you search for “special” characters (i.e. all characters that are not plain letters or digits) like diacritic characters.