How do I...?

You can do an enormous number of things with MAT. In this section, we provide you with some initial pointers for the various capabilities of MAT. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the ways the toolkit can be used; but we hope it will point you in the right directions.

How do I...

...incrementally build a corpus and train a Carafe model?

The various steps involved in this incremental, tag-a-little, learn-a-little loop deserve their own page, and are described here.

...use the MAT UI to hand-annotate documents?

You don't need to train a model or automatically tag data to use MAT. You can use the MAT UI as a pure hand annotation tool. Tutorial 1 covers this process pretty well, or, if your task involves more than simple span annotations, check out tutorial 8.

Here's a summary with pointers to more of the details. First, create your task and install it, or use a task you've already defined. Make sure that this task has a hand annotation step, as illustrated in the sample 'Named Entity' task. Then, start the Web server and load the MAT UI. You can either manually load and save individual documents on your local machine, or you can set up a workspace and access it in the UI.

...use the MAT scorer and UI to compare the output of multiple annotators or annotation tools?

To score simple span annotations (that is, annotations whose main label is the distinguishing element) against each other, you don't even need to have a task. You can use the scorer with the --content_annotations option.

If you're comparing multiple annotation tools, you can run them outside of MAT and ensure that their output can be read by MAT by identifying or creating a MAT reader. Alternatively, you can write a wrapper for the annotation tool, and create workflows and model configurations in task.xml which use the tool (this is harder, and not really documented).

If you're comparing multiple annotators, you can have them annotate the files in file mode and then compare them using the scorer, or you can use the  assignment capability in the workspaces to have the files multiply-annotated in the context of a workspace. In the future, you'll be able to score and reconcile these multiply-annotated files directly in the workspace.

...use MAT without its Web server to visualize or create annotations?

The MAT document visualization and annotation tool is available as a standalone utility which does not require the MATWeb server.

...upgrade the version of Java or Python that MAT depends on?

If you upgrade your version of Java or Python, and you want MAT to use the new version, the easiest thing to do is rerun the installer. See the installation instructions for your platform (Unix, MacOS or Windows native).