This section gives a brief introduction to the basic concepts and functionality of CorA.

What is CorA?

CorA (short for Corpus Annotator) is a web-based annotation tool, intended for token-level annotation of non-standard language data. Let’s break this down:

  • CorA is web-based. This means that users only need a web browser and an active internet connection to work with it, which has the advantage that users can work from any computer with access to the internet, without having to install any additional software. On the other hand, this means that you first need to have a web server where CorA can run. For details about the requirements and the installation process, see the section on installing CorA.

  • CorA is a token-level annotation tool. That means it is intended for linguistic annotation of texts, such as assigning part-of-speech tags to words. Various types of annotations are supported. The software is particularly designed for annotations on a token level, i.e. annotations with a one-to-one correspondence to tokens. Structural annotations, such as building syntax trees or labeling spans of text, are not supported and would be quite cumbersome to do in CorA.

  • CorA is designed with non-standard language data in mind. We use the term “non-standard” broadly to refer to anything that isn’t modern, standardized language (think of newspaper articles), such as: historical documents, computer-mediated communication (Twitter, Facebook, chat rooms, …), texts produced by language learners, etc. Various features of the tool have been designed for the particular needs of working with this type of data, such as:

How do I use CorA?

If you are a server administrator, you should look at the instructions for installing and configuring CorA on your web server.

If you are a regular user wanting to annotate in CorA, just point your web browser to the URL where your individual CorA instance is running. Your server administrator should tell you this URL, since it depends on where they installed the software — there is no “public” server available that you can use.

Once logged in to CorA, you can click on any of the available documents to open it in the editor. Documents are displayed in a table with one token per line, and columns for the different layers of annotation (such as POS or lemma), which could look like this:

Sample screenshot of the editor table

Sample screenshot of the editor table

Apart from annotating the text, you can also search in the currently opened document, edit a token itself, or call external annotation tools if your administrator has configured any.

Two important things to keep in mind:

  • Only one user at a time can work on any given document. While you’ve opened a document, nobody else can open the same document until you close it again or log out of CorA.

  • CorA requires an active internet connection. It’s not a problem if you get disconnected from the internet briefly (say, a few minutes), but since CorA frequently communicates with the server, longer disconnects will cause problems or render the tool unusable.

How do I get my data into CorA?

This section assumes that you’re an administrator, you have just installed a fresh copy of CorA on your server, and now you want to know what’s required to get your own texts into the software.

All documents are organized in projects, so the first thing you need to do is create a new project for your texts. If you’re an admin, you can always access all texts and projects, but if you want regular users to work with your project, you need to create user accounts for them and associate them with your project(s) in the project settings.

When you’ve done this, you need to decide which annotation layers to use with your texts. CorA supports various annotation layers such as POS tags, lemmatization, normalization, and others, but you don’t need to use all of them at the same time — you can configure which annotation layers will be used on a per-document or a per-project level. If you’re using a “closed” annotation layer (such as POS) that requires a tagset, you need to import the tagset before you can use it.

To import your own document into CorA, you’ll need to convert it to CorA-XML format first. This is likely to be the most time-consuming step, since it requires understanding the internal document model first.

Basically, a document consists of a set of tokens which can distinguish different tokenization layers (i.e., tokenization in the source document vs. tokenization for annotation purposes) and different string representations (e.g., a Unicode representation vs. a simplified ASCII string). Furthermore, each text is required to have layout information (i.e., which tokens belong to which pages/columns/lines in the source document). You don’t need to actually use all of these features — a simple script that converts text files with one token per line to CorA-XML is already part of the repository — but they still need to be represented in the XML.

Some features may require a deeper understanding of these internals if you want to configure them for your project, such as enabling the editing of tokens or embedding an external annotation tool, but this burden is mainly on the administrator, and not the regular user. Quite to the contrary, if you write a script that converts your documents to CorA-XML, you can even embed it into CorA to enable your users to conveniently import texts without having to worry about the conversion themselves.