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The Brandeis Annotation Tool

The Brandeis Annotation Tool (BAT) is a web-based text annotation tool that is centered around the notions of layered annotation and task decomposition. It allows annotations to refer to other annotations and to take a complicated task and split it into easier subtasks. The central organizing concept of BAT is the annotation layer. A corpus administrator can create annotation layers that involve annotation of extents, attributes or relations. The layer definition includes the labels used, the attributes that are available and restrictions on the values for those attributes. For each annotation layer, files can be assigned to one or more annotators and one judge. When annotators log in, the assigned layers and files therein are presented. When selecting a file to annotate, the interface uses the layer definition to display the annotation interface. The web-interface connects administrators and annotators to a central repository for all data and simplifies many of the housekeeping tasks while keeping requirements at a minimum (that is, users only need an internet connection and a well-behaved browser). BAT has been used mainly for temporal annotation, but can be considered a more general tool for several kinds of textual annotation.