neat: named entity annotation tool

Table of contents

1. Introduction

2. User Guide

   2.1 Installation

   2.2 Data format

   2.3 Navigation

   2.4 Saving progress

3. Annotation Guidelines

1. Introduction

neat is a simple, browser-based tool for editing and annotating text with named entities to produce labeled data for training/testing/evaluation. It can be used to add or correct named entity labels and to correct the token text or tokenization (e.g. due to OCR/segmentation errors).

neat is developed at the Berlin State Library for data annotation in the SoNAR-IDH project and the QURATOR project.

2. User Guide

2.1 Installation

neat runs locally as a pure HTML+JavaScript webpage in your web browser. No additional software needs to be installed, but JavaScript has to be enabled in the browser.

Clone the repo using git clone https://github.com/qurator-spk/neat.git or download and extract the ZIP. Make sure you have neat.html and neat.js in the same directory and open neat.html in a browser. Any fairly recent browser should work, but only Chrome and Firefox are tested.

2.2 Data format

The source data we use for annotation are OCR results in PAGE-XML format. We provide a Python tool for the transformation of OCR files in PAGE-XML into the TSV format used by neat.

The internal data format used by neat is based on the format used in the GermEval2014 Named Entity Recognition Shared Task. Text is encoded as one token per line, with name spans in the IOB2 format as tab-separated values:

• the first column contains either
  • # a comment to indicate the source the sentence is taken from, or
  • >=1 the token position within the sentence, or
  • 0 to mark sentence boundaries
• the second column contains the token text
• outer entity spans are encoded in the third column NE-TAG
• embedded entity spans are encoded in the fourth column NE-EMB

Example (simple)

No.	TOKEN	NE-TAG	NE-EMB
# https://example.url
1	Donnerstag	O	O
2	,	O	O
3	1	O	O	
4	.	O	O	
5	Januar	O	O	
6	.	O	O		
0		O	O
1	Berliner	B-ORG	B-LOC	
2	Tageblatt	I-ORG	O	
3	.	O	O		
0		O	O
1	Nr	O	O	
2	.	O	O		
3	1	O	O	
4	.	O	O	
0		O	O
1	Seite	O	O
2	3	O	O

For our purposes we extend this format by adding these (optional) values:

• a fifth column for an ID for the outer NE-TAG from an authority file (neat supports automatic linking for Wikidata identifiers)
• column six for use as a variable url_id for iiif Image API support (neat supports the embedding of image snippets into its interface to assist data annotation and correction if the PAGE-XML source contains word bounding boxes)
• columns 7-10 are used for storing left,right,top,bottom pixel coordinates for the image snippets

Example (full)

No.	TOKEN	NE-TAG	NE-EMB	ID	url_id	left,right,top,bottom
# https://example.url/iiif/left,right,top,bottom/full/0/default.jpg
1	Donnerstag	O	O	-	0	174,352,358,390
2	,	O	O	-	0	174,352,358,390	
3	1	O	O	-	0	367,392,361,381
4	.	O	O	-	0	370,397,352,379
5	Januar	O	O	-	0	406,518,358,386
6	.	O	O	-	0	406,518,358,386	
0
1	Berliner	B-ORG	B-LOC	Q455014	0	816,984,358,388
2	Tageblatt	I-ORG	O	Q455014	0	1005,1208,360,387
3	.	O	O	-	0	1005,1208,360,387
0
1	Nr	O	O	-	0	1237,1288,360,382
2	.	O	O	-	0	1237,1288,360,382
3	1	O	O	-	0	1304,1326,361,381
4	.	O	O	-	0	1304,1326,361,381
0
1	Seite	O	O	-	0	1837,1926,361,392
2	3	O	O	-	0	1939,1967,364,385

2.3 Navigation

neat can be used both with a keyboard or a mouse, but for ergonomic reasons, we strongly recommend the use of below key combinations.

Keyboard

Mouse

• use mouse wheel to scroll up and down

• left-click << and >> to move 15 rows up or down

• left-click O in the NE-TAG or NE-EMB column to open a drop-down menu and subsequently select any of the supported NE-Tags to tag a token or change an existing tag

• left-click the NE-TAG or NE-EMB column and select O to remove a tag

• left-click the TOKEN column to edit the token text

• left-click the POSITION and select split from the drop-down menu to create a copy of the current row below

• left-click the POSITION and select merge from the drop-down menu to merge the current row with the row above

• left-click the POSITION and select start-sentence from the drop-down menu to mark the start of a new sentence

2.4 Saving progress

neat runs fully locally in the browser. Therefore it can not automatically save any changes you made to disk. You have to use the Save Changes button to do so manually from time to time.

3. Annotation Guidelines

Annotation Guidelines