When you frequently use a certain linguistic type with a limited number of annotation values, it might be a good idea to associate a Controlled Vocabulary (CV) with it. Such a CV consists of a number of predefined values that a user can choose from when editing an annotation, thus making the task of the annotator less error-prone. E.g. one can choose to create a controlled vocabulary for part of speech tagging, as the tags that are used often reoccur. In order to do this select Edit > Edit Controlled Vocabularies. The following dialog will appear:
Figure 5.30. Edit controlled vocabulary
To create a new CV, do the following:
The undo function in the CV dialog window only works as long as that window is active. Once it is closed changes cannot be undone any more.
By clicking More Options... (not yet shown in the figure above) you can choose a color that will fill the lower part of every annotation frame containing the selected CV entry. Moreover, you can choose a shortcut key to edit an annotation with a single key stroke.
The color chooser has four tabs. The last three contain different ways to choose a color, which is subsequently displayed in the lower part of the window. In the first tab you can add or insert the color displayed below and you can copy, paste and delete the selected color. The list of favourite colors is saved and used the next time you start ELAN.
In ELAN it is possible to associate an entry of a controlled vocabulary with a data
category of the ISO Data Category Repository (DCR). To do so click on
Edit in the ELAN main menu and select Edit
Controlled Vocabularies.... In the window that now appears, click the
Browse... button to the right of the ISO Data
Category
option. In the next window (Figure 5.31, “Local Data Category Selection”), first select a profile in the left
panel and then select a data category in the middle panel. Finally click on Apply
to
associate the selected data category to the CV entry.
More information about the ISO DCR and how to use it can be found in Data categories.
Instead of creating a Controlled Vocabulary again every time ELAN also supports the
possibility to reuse existing CV's. A first way to achieve this is to use a template
file that contains a CV when creating a new *.eaf
file. (See Creating a new document) Alternatively you can import a CV for already
existing files:
If you try to import a CV with the same name as an already existing CV a dialog will pop up asking what to do:
A created or imported controlled vocabulary is part of the current transcription and
is therefore part of the .eaf
file when the transcription is saved.
However, there are situations in which a controlled vocabulary is shared between two
or
more transcriptions and change to that CV should be propagated to all transcription
that
use that CV. For this purpose, ELAN enables you to link to a controlled vocabulary
that
is either on your local or attached hard disk or somewhere on the network or the Internet:
Similar to the Import CV process, if you try to import a CV with the same name as an already existing CV a dialog will pop up asking what to do (see Figure 5.32, “Controlled vocabulary already exists warning”).
The entries of an External CV cannot be edited nor their ISO Data Category. Also the order of the entries cannot be change. The possibility to add a color and shortcut key to an entry via the More Options... button is still there.
A CV can be exported by saving the current file as a template. (See Saving a selection as .eaf file)
When editing an annotation that belongs to a linguistic type associated with a CV, a drop down box appears, the suggest panel. Just select the value to be filled in:
More information about entering annotations from a CV and working with the Suggest Panel, see section 5.8.3.