The Annotation Graph Toolkit: Software Components for Building Linguistic Annotation Tools

Annotation graphs provide an efficient and expressive data model for linguistic annotations of time-series data. This paper reports progress on a complete software infrastructure supporting the rapid development of tools for transcribing and annotating time-series data. This general-purpose infrastructure uses annotation graphs as the underlying model, and allows developers to quickly create special-purpose annotation tools using common components. An application programming interface, an I/O library, and graphical user interfaces are described. Our experience has shown us that it is a straightforward task to create new special-purpose annotation tools based on this general-purpose infrastructure.