Hi,

we are running a fairly large inter-disciplinary research project where we need to annotate a substantial number of corpora. We just finished a rather thorough evaluation of annotation tools incl. Elan and commercial tools (Mangold and Noldus).

Compared to the (pricey) commercial tools, Elan is actually doing very well. We found a few minor things, which are missing but that should be ok. The GUI is certainly not as advanced and user-friendly as those from other tools.

Anyway. The biggest thing we are missing is the notion of event-based annotations. As far as we understand, in Elan every annotation has a duration. However, our psychologists have a number of examples where they are interested in triggering certain events, as for a trivial example, someone turned on the light.

I was wondering whether we are missing something or whether it is currently actually not possible to have annotation without duration. Our current work-around is to define the shortest annotation possible and use that as "event" annotation, which is only a bad hack, though.

If there was no event-like annotation, I was wondering whether there are any thoughts of adding this functionality to Elan sometimes soon.

Cheers
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

can you give some examples of how the GUI of the other tools is more user friendly? Maybe ELAN could be improved? Are you using the newest versions of ELAN? Regarding the concept of annotating a point of time instead of a time span, with the example of switching on the light: The shortest time span that you would annotate is 1 millisecond, but in a video, each frame represents dozens of milliseconds. So I personally think even annotating the whole duration of the relevant frame, much longer than the shortest possible annotation, would still be very appropriate...

Eric

To add a bit of comment to this: you didn't miss anything, this type of annotation is currently not supported. When we import e.g. Praat annotations, which does have this kind of single point annotations, each annotation is given a duration in ELAN (the same kind of hack you describe).
In the EAF schema it would require only a minor modification to support alignable annotations with a single time point (time slot). In ELAN itself, in the user interface and in lots of operations that can be performed, it would require a significant amount of work to support this type of annotations.
We might consider to do this, but it is not high on our priority list.

-Han

Ok, here's the feedback I got from one of our psychologists, i.e., the main users of the annotation tool (context: annotation of severe behavior):

"Currently all annotations within Elan require the user to mark the start and end of an event, and as such, are duration codes. However, there are plenty of instances where one is annotating behaviors that do not have a start and end, but occur at a moment in time. As an example, you might want to note the moment of impact of a punch and its target - the moment the fist makes contact with the other person's head, torso or arms. There is currently no quick, user-friendly way to do this within Elan. The segmentation mode requires you to define an arbitrary duration, and does not support controlled vocabularies - you have to first segment each tier, and then go back over the segmentations and attach labels from the relevant controlled vocabulary. What I would like to be able to do, and the other programs like Observer and Interact have this capability, is to watch a video, pause it at a moment in time, and then click a single key to insert a time-annotation at that moment in time (labeled with the relevant option from the controlled vocabulary). Ideally, there would be the ability to associate certain keyboard keys with particular controlled vocabularies. Going back to my example, I would like to watch my video, and when there's a punch to the head, I just have to click "h" to mark the moment of impact in the timeline. If that's then followed by a punch to the chest, I click "c" at the moment of impact, etc."

Yes, that's all clear and the main issue, the mandatory duration for annotations in ELAN, will not change soon.

The other point mentioned, controlled vocabularies with a keyboard shortcut for each entry that can be used in segmentation mode, is in fact already implemented. In the Edit Controlled Vocabulary window there is a More Options button, one of these extra options is a keyboard key per entry.
But, unfortunately, this functionality appears to be broken in the current release of ELAN. We'll fix that for the next release.

-Han