9th April, 2010

Version 0.4.1 released on Sourceforge.net.

There are the following major changes/additions in this release:

1. Propbank Annotation is a separate application now, instead of being a mode of operation in the Syntactic Annotation Interface. The two letter code is PB.
2. Both the Propbank Annotation and the Syntactic Annotation interfaces can now work in two modes: file mode and the task mode, which can be specified in the the file Sanchay/props/client-modes.txt. You can change it according to your needs.
3. In the task mode, the dormant but previously active facilities of annotation comparison and task generation are available. They are quite simple and should be easy to use.
4. In the task mode, new facilities include the ability to specify two users and two adjudicators for every annotation task. In the beginning, all the tasks (which have been created) are available to everyone, but as soon as two users claim them (by opening and saving them), they become unavailable to others. Only the adjudicators can use the comparison (annotation diff) facility. Look for a file like Sanchay/workspace/syn-annotation/Premchand/Premchand-list.txt, which lists the tasks belonging to the task group named Premchand (one of the greatest Hindi writers). There is a task properties file for every task in the task group, which specifies the details used by the annotation interface. Generating tasks means specifying the files to be annotated and automatically generating the task properties files and the task list file.

If you intend to use the task mode of annotation, which is what I would recommend, then you should try to use the Task Generation facility. You can access it in the task mode, when you select the Setup mode (the other modes being the Work mode and the Compare mode). Once you go through a task list file, such as the one mentioned above, and the task properties files generated in the Setup mode, you will get a fairly good idea about how the task mode operates.

The assumption for the task mode right now is that Sanchay will be located on one computer (preferably Linux: I am not sure whether it can work on Windows for multiple users) and that computer will have accounts for every user who is going to be involved in the annotation process. To make sure that Sanchay is accessible to all these users (write permissions are needed for some properties files), one simple way is to create a group and give read and write permissions to that group for the whole Sanchay directory, except the files you want to have restricted access, e.g. the task list file and client mode file.