Tutorial 1: Load and Hand Tag a Document

To get our feet wet with MAT, let's load and hand tag a document. We're going to use a task that comes with MAT, which is a simple task for named entity tagging (identifying people, organizations and locations). Make sure you're familiar with the "Conventions" section in your platform-specific instructions in the "Getting Started" section of the documentation. We're going to do this tutorial in file mode.

Step 1: Install the task

While the named entity task is included in the distribution, it is not installed yet. The named entity task implementation is in the sample/ne subdirectory of MAT_PKG_HOME. Install it as follows:

Unix:

% cd $MAT_PKG_HOME
% bin/MATManagePluginDirs install $PWD/sample/ne

Windows native:

> cd %MAT_PKG_HOME%
> bin\MATManagePluginDirs.cmd install %CD%\sample\ne

(If you received this distribution as a tarball, you won't have to do this with any tasks you find in src/tasks inside the tarball; these will have been installed as part of the overall installation procedure.)

Step 2: Start the UI

See the documentation on starting the Web server and starting the UI.

Step 3: Load a document

You're now ready to load a document.

• In the UI, select File -> Open file... . You'll see a popup window.
• Set the task dropdown menu to "Named Entity", if it isn't already set.
• Select "Hand annotation" as your workflow.
• Press the "Browse" button next to "Input", and navigate to MAT_PKG_HOME/sample/ne/resources/data/raw. Select any of the files in that directory.
• The document type should already be "raw", and encoding should be "ascii".
• Press the "Open" button, which should be active as soon as you select an input file.

You should now see a window which contains the document:

At the top, you'll see a menu where you can change the workflow. You'll see immediately below a status line, which contains each of the steps in the workflow; steps which are finished will be grayed out, and none should be grayed out at the moment. To the right of the status line is a forward button (move one step forward) and a backward button, and a reload button. Below left, you see a document pane containing the document, with a tag legend to the right, and at the bottom, a tagging status line which should say "Hand annotation unavailable".

The document window has two icons at the right end of its top bar. The "-" will hide the document, and the "x" will close it. The Show/Hide menu at the top of the UI provides an alternate way of hiding the document, and a way of showing it once it's hidden. Try the various ways to hide and show the document. If you press the "x" by mistake, just follow the instructions in this step above to load the document again.

Step 4: Prepare the document for hand tagging

You're now ready to prepare the document for hand tagging. In order for the document to be hand taggable, it must be tokenized; i.e., the basic word elements must be identified. In addition, the regions of the document which might contain interesting elements must be identified (this is called "zoning").

Press the forward button. The zone step should be grayed out. You shouldn't see any change in the document pane, because this particular task treats the entire document as potentially interesting; if there were uninteresting areas, they would be grayed out in the document text:

Press the forward button again. The tokenize step should be grayed out, and all the words in the document should be surrounded by faint boxes. These outlines show you where the system believes the word boundaries are, which will be relevant in a moment:

At the bottom, it should now say "Hand annotation available (swipe or left-click)".

You're now in the "hand tag" step. Note that this step is special, in that the user performs it, not the MAT engine. The "hand tag" step is mostly a placeholder for your annotation activity. Behind the scenes, the document is marked as being tagged as soon as you insert the first tag, but the UI doesn't advance you past the "hand tag" step while the document is still open.

Step 5: Insert some tags

There are two ways to select text to tag. You can swipe using the mouse (click left, hold, and move), or click left on an individual word. The system will expand the selection to the nearest word boundaries, and pop up a tagging menu. You can select the appropriate tag with the mouse, or use the keyboard accelerators (in parentheses in the menu) or navigate the menu using the up and down mouse buttons and select with <return>.

If you need to remove or change a tag, you can do one of two things. You can swipe some of the tokens in the tag to select just that portion of the tag, or you can left-click on one of the tokens, and the entire tag will be selected. Any tags your selection overlaps will be removed; if you replace the tag with another one, only the selected region will be reannotated.

Step 6: Save the document

Press the "Save" button, and select "mat-json". You should be prompted with a file save dialog. Put this file somewhere you can find it again; we'll come back to it in a bit. Give it a name like "annotated_doc.json".

What you're doing is saving your document, along with its annotations. MAT uses standoff annotations, which record an annotation by recording offsets into the document, rather than in-line annotations, where the annotations would be inserted into the document text directly (e.g., XML). MAT's standoff annotation format is our own format, built on top of the Javascript Object Notation (JSON).

Step 6: Close and reload the annotated document, with logging

Finally, you'll close and reload this document, so you can see how loading an annotated document differs from loading a raw document. We'll also see how to start and stop the MAT UI logger.

To close the document, press the "x" in the upper-right corner of the document pane.

Now, let's start the logger.

• In the UI, select "Logging -> Start".
  

Now, let's reload the document. All our actions will be logged.

• In the UI, select File -> Open file... . You'll see a popup window.
• Set the task dropdown menu to "Named Entity", if it isn't already set.
• Select "Hand annotation" as your workflow.
• Press the "Browse" button next to "Input", and navigate to the document you just saved.
• Select "mat-json" as the document type. The encoding should automatically switch to utf-8, and it should not be editable.
  
• Press the "Open" button, which should be active as soon as you select an input file.

A window should appear which shows your annotated document, complete with its previous state, including the automatic steps you performed and the annotations you added.

Step 7: View the logging output

In this open window, add and remove some annotations, then select "Logging -> Stop". The browser will download a CSV file which contains the contents of the log. Open the file in your favorite spreadsheet application to see how your actions were logged, and see the logger documentation for a description of the logger output.

Step 8: Shut down the Web server

Shut down your Web server. You can find instructions on how to do that in the documentation on starting the Web server.

Step 9: Clean up (optional)

If you're not planning on doing any other tutorials, and you don't want the "Named Entity" task hanging around, remove it as follows:

Unix:

% cd $MAT_PKG_HOME
% bin/MATManagePluginDirs remove $PWD/sample/ne

Windows native:

> cd %MAT_PKG_HOME%%
> bin\MATManagePluginDirs.cmd remove %CD%\sample\ne

This concludes Tutorial 1.