Table of Contents
The ELAN tool allows you:
To search for text, do the following:
You can always make use of regular expressions to conduct your searches when “regular expression” is checked. (see Appendix A, REGULAR EXPRESSION SEARCH for the regular expression syntax).
By default the search is not case sensitive. To change this, select the “case sensitive” checkbox.
Optionally, specify the interval to search in (from ... s …ms to … s … ms). Make a choice between searching within a time interval and finding annotations that overlap with a certain interval. Click on Add new constraint to add a second tier and search item. Up to 10 constraints can be used. There exist 2 kinds of them:
For example: annotations contained in a structural distance of –1 to 2 tx-annotations from trees on the tier tx are sees, trees, and, flowers.
Table 4.1. Annotation example
tier | annotations | |||||||
st (sentence) | He sees trees and flowers. | |||||||
tx (word) | he | sees | trees | and | flowers | |||
mb (morpheme break) | … | see | -s | tree | -s | … | flower | -s |
ps (part of speech) | … | V | SUF | N | SUF | … | N | SUF |
It is possible to search on different tiers within one annotation. For example, the search parameters illustrated below search for all annotations on the tier tx, which contain “-s” in one of their morpheme breaks and “N” in one of their parts of speech. (Both “-s” and “N” are in distance of “0 words”, i.e., they occur within the same word as specified on the tier tx.) I.e., these parameters would find “trees” and “flowers” in the above example, but not “sees”.
Another option is searching for sequences of utterances, words or other annotations on the same tier, e.g.:
You can delete the second (or third) search item. Click on
Delete last constraint to delete it.
You only need this option if you want to select a non-default character set. The box automatically displays the default set of the selected tier (see Changing tier attributes).
After you have specified your search parameters, click OK to start the search process.
Make sure the box next to Regular Expression is checked when you search for “special” characters (i.e. all characters that are not plain letters or digits) like diacritic characters.
Suppose we are investigating turn taking and we want to find all switches from speaker W to speaker K that don’t overlap, with gaps of at most 2 seconds. In order to find this, we fill in the search form as follows:
After the Search is completed, ELAN displays the following search results:
When performing multiple search actions one after another, a search history is created. With this feature it becomes possible to browse through all the entered queries:
When closing the search dialog, the query history is removed. If nonetheless you want to save a certain search command, have a look at Saving and loading queries.
After a search operation, one can perform another search within the results of the previous action. To achieve this, select Search on current result from the Query menu in the Search dialog window. This will get you the following window:
By specifying extra search constraints, you can narrow down the results. This
is similar to the addition of an extra search constraint.
When using complex queries, or one is repeating the same search on annotation files, it is convenient to reuse a query. This is possible in ELAN thanks to the save and load query functionality.
To export the results of a query to a tab-separated file, go through these steps:
An exported file looks as follows:
If you right click in the table containing the search results, a popup menu
appears. Tick the checkboxes to show or hide columns that are related to the found
annotations. In the same popup menu you will find the option Export Table
as tab-delimited text, which literally saves the displayed result
table to a text file, as shown in the example below.
You can jump from the annotations displayed in the Search-Dialog window to the corresponding annotations in the ELAN window. This option allows you to access other types of information that are linked to the annotations found: to listen to the audio, to watch the video, to view the waveform or to read the annotations on different tiers.
Do the following: In the Search-Dialog window, click on the annotation that you want to jump to. It will be highlighted in blue color. In the ELAN window, the corresponding annotation is automatically accessed.
The screen display should look similar to the following illustration: