Hello Sorina, 

I don't have a direct answer to your question. But, once I referred to a useful website that deals with software in relation to qualitative research. Maybe, it might come in useful for your analysis, as well. Here is the link: http://www.unige.ch/ses/sococ/aqual/links/qualsoft.html. Have a glance at it.  Hope that will help you find, at least, some answers. Good luck! Ali. 

http://www.unige.ch/ses/sococ/aqual/links/qualsoft.html

Hi Ali,

Thank you  for breaking the ice with an answer to my question! Thank you for the link too, I hope I'll find something useful there.

Hi Sorina,

I am using SALT for Spanish and English (http://www.saltsoftware.com/). I don't know what languages you need to manage . It is a very user-friendly tool. You can transcript and redefine your own lists of words (concordances) and declare your own tags ([tag]).

You can check also the CHILDES project  tools (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/).

Hope it helps.

Good luck!

Thank you for your answer, Magdalena! I study English and Romanian. I didn't know about SALT. It sounds interesting, especially as you also use it for English and a Romance language (like Romanian). I'll also have a look at CHILDES. Best regards!

I agree with both Ali and Magdalena. The SALT software will allow you to conduct analysis on many linguistic features. However, I'm not sure if you are able to add specific syntax to direct it to identify unique linguistic structures.  I'm sure the company will gladly answer this question. In regards to qualitative research software, I think you might be pleasantly surprised by NVIVO (http://www.qsrinternational.com). It allows you to parallel code written, audio, and video transcripts based upon your established criteria. I found the software to be user-friendly, but I would also recommend attending one of their many trainings. I hope this helps. 

Thank you, Franklin! NVIVO seems quite impressive, at least from what I see on their website. I'll try the demo version to see how I can handle it :). Best wishes!

I have used NVIVO before in order to analyze my qualitative data. It's a little bit complex, particularly for new starters but there're some useful guidelines available publicly on the Internet and some videos on you tube. But it definitely requires a bit training. I attended two training sessions for it before I actually started using it. If you're interested, I can share my notes and the files given to us in the training. Best of luck!!! Ali. 

Hi Sorina,

I don't know many tools for annotating parallel corpora directly, rather than annotating each language separately (I guess the Stockholm TreeAligner for syntax is an exception: http://kitt.ifi.uzh.ch/kitt/treealigner). 

If you're looking to annotate spans of text with some properties, you might find EXMARaLDA (http://www.exmaralda.org/en/) or ELAN (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/) useful - they'll just let you put arbitrary annotations, as many as you like, corresponding to certain areas in the text. 

And if you want to do more hierarchical annotations of relations between sentences in a text, for example using Rhetorical Structure Theory, you might be interested in rstWeb (https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/rstweb/info/) or RSTTool (http://www.wagsoft.com/RSTTool/). You can find a bunch of tools for working with RST here: http://www.sfu.ca/rst/06tools/.

Hope this helps!

Amir

Amir, thank you for your answer! You seem to have guessed the direction of my research, which is more oriented towards text analysis and rhetorical structuring. I am familiar with the RST system (by the way, Daniel Marcu is also Romanian :)), but since I have little training with programming languages, I still have some difficulties working with its tools (I guess this is something all text-linguists experience at some point :)). This is why I'm interested in seeing what other discourse analysis tools are available now and maybe adapt them to my specific needs. Anyway, thank you for your advice, I'll also test the other programs you recommended. Best regards!

I have used Elan and it is very efficient and, through it, you can export you work to a spreadsheet. It is free, user-friendly and has a wide community of users. Downloadbale from here:

https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/

Hi Sorina,

you could try Webanno (https://webanno.github.io/webanno/), which is based on Brat (http://brat.nlplab.org/). Webanno is a very versatile tool for text annotation: you can annotate pretty much what you need, as all annotations are based on dependency graphs. You can do syntactic constituent or head/dependent  annotations, Named Entity, anaphora, Frame-semantics annotations, etc. 

Since annotations are stored as graphs, inter-phrastic annotations, or even textual-level annotations are possible. Webanno adds user management features, as well as useful corpus management and annotator profiling features: you can see who has started or completed their annotation, compute inter-annotator agreement scores on the fly, curate, correct and validate all the annotations.

On the minus side, you need to set up a working LAMP or WAMP server: you need a dedicated server (or your own box if you're working alone) with a database (mysql I think) to store annotations, as well as the proper python/PhP library versions. Webanno seems geared toward large-scale corpus annotations (there even is a module to connect to Amazon's Mechanical Turk services) rather than small-scale annotations. And it's not meant to annotate parallel corpora, even though all the basic components are there. To top it all, it's hard to customize the built-in segmentation rules (sentence and word segmentation), so this could be a problem in a multilingual setting.

Hope this helps,

Antonio.

Hi, Antonio,

Thank you for your suggestions! Webanno seems a little too complicated for me, but it's worth a try! Best wishes!

ELAN, developed at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, is also good

https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/

Hey Sarina,

I co-develop myself the text annotation tool https://www.tagtog.net

Not sure if it catches all what you need, but it's a simple-to-use interface, web-based, and a free tool for all research. Currently you can annotate concepts/entities in text, assign labels to documents, draw relationships between entities, or assign labels to entities too. You can also have "parallel" questions to ask (for example, "do these texts in Spanish and Rumanian mean the same?") showing both translations. With all this you can easily generate training data for your machine learning models or just get statistics from the data.

If you guys need something like this, please ping me up. We are constantly improving the tool to make it more accessible and feature rich.

Hope that helps

Hi, Juan Miguel,

Thank you for your recommendation! It looks interesting and I will try it soon.

Best regards,

Sorina

You can try DataTurks [https://dataturks.com/] . Slick UI, collaboration, gamification, web interface. Free for academic research.

Live Demo:

https://dataturks.com/projects/Dataturks/Demo%20Document%20Annotations

Thank you, Gajendra,

I've had a look and an interesting feature is the possibility to work with collaborators. Worth a try!

Sorina Ciobanu I know this is an old question, but Doccano (https://github.com/chakki-works/doccano) is very useful and simple to use.

I've designed a tool for computing the inter-annotator agreement to Doccano. It might be useful :)

https://github.com/vwoloszyn/diaa

You can look at the examples of projects that have used BRAT (http://brat.nlplab.org/examples.html)

Checkout UBIAI [https://ubiai.tools], it has the best UI and most complete NLP features:

• Easy to use UI for NER annotation
• Multi-format document upload: TXT, CSV (batch upload), JSON (allows you to import and modify already annotated JSON files), PDF, DOC, HTML
• Dictionary/Regex auto-annotation: input a list of words or regex patterns along with their associated entities. The tool will automatically scan the documents and auto-annotate
• ML auto-annotation: Train an NER model to auto-annotate your documents
• Bias detection: visualize entity and word distribution across your documents to detect skewed annotation toward specific entities.
• Collaboration: Share annotation tasks among team members and monitor progress
• Annotation format export: JSON, IOB, Amazon Comprehend, Stanford CoreNL