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Lexical Annotation Workbench

Lexical Annotation Workbench is an integrated environment for morphological annotation. It supports simple morphological annotation (assigning a lemma and tag to a word), integration and comparison of different annotations of the same text, searching for particular word, tag etc. The workbench runs on all operating systems supporting Java, including Windows and Linux. It is an open system extensible via plugins - e.g., views, import/export filters, helps. The primary file format is the PDT 2.0 format (a PML instantiation); it is possible to import and export data in the PDT 1.0 format (CSTS) and the TNT format. In the near future, the workbench will be extended with various statistical analysis functions and assistance from external tools like taggers and parsers.

The application is organized around layers of annotation. Typically, each morphological layer (an m-layer) contains information provided by a specific tool or process, e.g., a morphological analyzer, a tagger, an annotator. In the PDT 2.0 format, each layer corresponds to a single file.

Installation Instructions

Make sure you have Java Runtime Environment 5.0 (aka 1.5) installed. You can use this online test to determine it (the Java Runtime Version should be 1.5.x_xx). If not, it can be downloaded here. LAW was not tested with the upcomming release of Java 6.0 Mustang, however there is no reason to assume that it would not work.

Windows

  1. If you used the extension directory (usually C:/Program Files/java/jre1.5xxx/lib/ext) in previous installs, remove the Law jars (LAW.jar, util.jar, vldocking_2.0.x.jar) from there.
  2. Unpack the installation archive to a directory of your choice (below, I assume it is the usual place C:\Program Files).
  3. Make a shortcut on your desktop to javaw -Xmx196m -jar "C:/Program Files/Law/Law.jar" (do not forget the quotes). (Right click on the desktop, select New > Shortcut)
    Note: The shortcut can specify your login-name, say you are called john, then you can avoid the initial login dialog by using: javaw -Xmx196m -jar "C:/Program Files/Law/Law.jar" -u john. You can have multiple shortcuts, each for a different annotator.
See the advanced section below if you have less than 256MB memory or you want/need to change the default location of the configuration or logging files (e.g. because the application folder is not writable).

Linux

  1. Unzip the installation archive into a directory of your choice, say /home/ab/law
  2. Run the system as java -Xmx198m -jar /home/ab/law/Law.jar
    Note: The shortcut can specify your login-name, say you are called john, then you can avoid the initial login dialog by using: java -Xmx196m -jar /home/ab/law/Law.jar -u john.
See the advanced section below if you have less than 256MB memory or you want/need to change the default location of the configuration or logging files (e.g. because the application folder is not writable).

Advanced Installation Options

Changing memory configuration:

The number behind -Xmx says how much memory is available to the program, it should not be higher than 75% of your physical memory. For example, if you have only 128 MB RAM use -Xmx96m.

If you are working with large files and have enough memory you can increase the number.

Changing location of the configuration files

By default, the configuration files are in the conf subfolder of the application folder. You can change this (e.g. because you want to have multiple configurations) by using -confD folder switch:

Changing the location of the logging file

By default, problems with the program are logged to the problems.log file in the application folder. You can change this by using -logF file switch:

Known Issues