Alpheios Annotation & Alignment Editors

Name

Brief description

Website, project wiki, or other relevant links

• Alpheios Website
• Treebanking Forum
• Treebank Editor Demo Environment
• Alignment Editor Demo Environment

Presentation slides, talks, or screencasts

• Treebank Editor Screencast
• Alignment Editor Screencast
• Alpheios Overview

Pre-workshop questions

1. What does your tool do? What are your core use cases?

The Alpheios Treebank Editor is a graphical user interface tool for annotating sentence dependency tree diagrams. The Alpheios Alignment Editor is a graphical user interface tool for aligning a text to its translation.  The editors can be used as standalone tools, but also can be integrated into other system through use of their RESTful APIs.

2. Who are your current users? What do you see as the project’s long-term impact for the scholarly community?

Our tools have three basic purposes:

• to make access to scholarly apparatus (lexical, grammatical, semantic) more convenient for scholars (and amateurs) when reading foreign language texts in machine-readable form.
• to encourage and facilitate the study of the classical languages themselves.
• to help develop ancillary resources for the above purposes - such as tree banked texts and texts aligned with translations.

Tools such as our tree-bank editor and alignment editor can serve as pedagogical devices while contributing to the accumulation of databanks that can be used for linguistic research as well as the generation of automatic assessment tools. 

To date there have been some five thousand downloads of our reading tools. We are most aware of their use in secondary schools and Montessori elementary schools, where they have become quite popular.

The Treebank Editor is currently in use by both Perseus and The Alpheios Project.  The Alignment Editor is currently in use by The Alpheios Project.

3. How does your tool fit into the proposed five genres for Corpora Space tools? Is it a stand-alone application or a library that supports one or more of these categories of task? What is the current interface? CLI or GUI? Web or desktop?

The Alpheios Treebank and Alignment Editors are annotation tools.  The annotations produced by these tools can be used for data curation, collation, analysis, and visualization

4. What kinds of data does the tool work with? What kinds of structure does it expect or require? What kinds of formats does it produce and consume?

The Alpheios Treebank Editor and works with a number of different dependency tree annotation schemas, including the Perseus Ancient Greek and Latin Treebank, CATiB, and PROIEL.

The Alpheios Alignment Editor works with TEI XML.

Both tools produce XML.

5. What kinds of technology is your tool built on (languages, runtimes, libraries, platforms)?

Javascript, SVG, XQuery, XSLT

6. How is your tool licensed? Are there licensing restrictions on any resources that your tool depends on?

GPL 3.0 for source code; Creative Commons SA for texts.

7. What advantages do you see for your project in a collaboration with Corpora Space? What do you see your project bringing to Corpora Space?

We should like to add collaborative features for semantic annotation to our treebank and alignment editors and explore alternatives for integrating them with static and dynamically evolving databases. This would seem to provide a relevant case study for the corpora space.