There are many annotation tools available in different forms. Some are standalone and can be configured or installed on a local machine, some are cloud-based, some are free, and some are paid. In this section, we will focus on free annotation tools, get an idea of how to use them, and see what we can achieve with annotation.
To see how we can use annotations to create a dataset, we will look at these tools:
- brat
- Stanford Annotator
brat stands for brat rapid annotation tool and can be found at http://brat.nlplab.org/index.html. It can be used online or offline. Installing it on your local machine is simple: follow the steps listed at http://brat.nlplab.org/installation.html. Once installed and running, open the browser. You need to create a text1.txt file in the data/test directory with the following content:
Joe was the last person to see Fred. He saw him in Boston at McKenzie's pub at 3:00 where he paid $2.45 for an ale. Joe wanted to go to...