Overview

The MITRE Annotation Toolkit (MAT) is a suite of tools which can be used for automated and human tagging of annotations.

If you don't know what annotation is, here's a quick and dirty definition: annotation is a process, used mostly by researchers in natural  language processing, of enhancing documents with information about the various phrase types the documents contain. So if the document contains the sentence "John F. Kennedy visited Guam", the document would be enhanced with the information that "John F. Kennedy" is a person, and "Guam" is a location. The MAT toolkit provides support for defining the types of information that should be added, and for adding that information manually or automatically.

MAT supports both UI interaction and command-line interaction, and provides various levels of control over the overall annotation process. It can be customized for specific tasks (e.g., named entity identification, de-identification of medical records). The goal of MAT is not to help you configure your training engine (in the default case, the jCarafe CRF system) to achieve the best possible performance on your data. MAT is for "everything else": all the tools you end up wishing you had.

What's in MAT?

MAT contains:

• a span tag and attribute trainer and decoder (the jCarafe CRF and maximum-entropy classifier tool)
• a logging-enabled Web-based hand annotation, alignment, comparison and reconciliation tool for span, attribute and relation annotation tasks
  
• a Web- and command-line-based process workflow engine (for multiple-step tagging)
  
• a Web- and command-line-based document management engine (for managing the state of your documents)
• a scorer for span and relation annotations which produces detailed Excel- or OpenOffice-compatible CSV files
• a concordance tool for span and relation annotations which produces CSV or aligned text output
• a transduction tool which converts annotated documents among various formats, and supports a declarative XML format for specifying annotation conversions (e.g., changing attribute value or label names)
  
• an XML-configurable experiment engine
• a standalone document viewing, annotation, alignment and comparison tool

The primary task for which MAT was built is the tag-a-little, learn-a-little (TALLAL) loop, which we'll describe in a minute, but because the MAT components are loosely coupled, you can do a whole range of things with MAT, like

• view annotated documents
• visually compare the output of multiple annotation tools
  
• annotate documents using a Web browser and save them in your favorite format

Some of these things require a little work on your part, but MAT's value added is considerable.

What was MAT designed for?

MAT's design targets the tag-a-little, learn-a-little (TALLAL) loop, illustrated here:

The TALLAL loop is used for jointly creating corpora of correctly-annotated documents, side by side with a model for automatically adding these annotations to documents. In the default case, the user begins by hand-annotating a group of documents, and using the trainer to create a model for automatic tagging. The user then uses the model to create automatically annotated documents, which can then be hand-corrected and added to the corpus of documents available as inputs to model creation. In this way, the user expands the corpus, while creating a better-fitting model, and reducing effort on each iteration as the model improves. At various points, the user can also use the correctly-annotated corpus to assess the accuracy of the model, using the experiment engine.