The MATE workbench annotation tool, a technical description

The MATE workbench is a tool which aims to simplify the tasks of annotating, displaying and querying speech or text corpora. It is designed to help humans create language resources, and to make it easier for different groups to use one another's data, by providing one tool which can be used with many different annotation schemes. Any annotation scheme which can be converted to XML can be used with the workbench, and display formats optimised for particular annotation tasks are created using a transformation language similar to XSLT. The workbench is written entirely in Java, which means that it is platform-independent. 1. Introduction The MATE workbench provides a general framework for defining specialised annotation editors, and makes the writing of an editor tool for a particular annotation scheme and particular annotation task relatively easy. This generality is provided by allowing the use of any annotation schema coded in XML (Bray et al., 1998; Goldfarb and Prescod, 1998) and b..