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FIN-CLARIN VRT Tools

These command-line tools implement composable manipulations of segmented and annotated text in a VRT format aka verticalized text, related to Corpus WorkBench that is used in the backend to the Korp concordance enginge.

The VRT tools proper include (or are planned to include)

  • generic and special format manipulations
  • tokenization to produce VRT from a preliminary format (initially UDPipe tokenizers, soon also HFST tokenizers)
  • morphosyntactic annotators (initially Finnish pipeline from Turku NLP)
  • name recognition (FiNER planned soon)
  • report generation (sentence length already implemented)
  • conversion to other formats (to be planned)

Some tools depend on separate programs and models that are installed in the Taito command-line environment. These are typically free software, available for installation elsewhere.

Highlights

The basic function of the VRT tools is to preserve previous annotations, including structural markup that may contain valuable information about the text units, without the underlying tools even knowing that their input sentences are extracted from such context. New annotations from an underlying tool are added to their proper place in the input document.

The major innovation in FIN-CLARIN VRT is the use of names for the fields that are only positional in basic format. In the basic format the declaration of names is only a comment but these VRT tools use it extensively.

<!-- #vrt positional-attributes: word lemma pos -->

Field names facilitate further annotation of tokens regardless of what previous annotations exist.

(Please note that the format of the attribute name comment was changed slightly for VRT tools version 0.7.2 (2019-04-05). The old-format comment with Positional attributes instead of #vrt positional-attributes is still recognized by the tools.)

A minor innovation is the use of auxiliary formats to facilitate the production of VRT from other formats and manipulation of large VRT corpora in conveniently sized fragments.

Most of the tools transform an input document into an output document. Such tools have a common set of options that allow them to compose flexibly in different ways:

  • read from a named file or from standard input;
  • write to standard output, or
  • write to an explicitly named file, or
  • write to a sibling to the input file, or
  • replace the input file with the output,
  • with an optional backup file.

In case of failure, any partial output is left in a transparently named temporary file.

To be continued