Annotation tool for lecture transcripts

Question

I have to annotate some lecture transcripts with multiple sentences or paragraphs per annotation category. GATE seems to be cumbersome and less responsive whereas brat is intuitive but multisentence\multi-line annotation is complex and buggy.

Are there any annotation tools catering to lecture transcripts? In my case there is almost no meta data and only contiguous transcript of a single speaker text .

Tools already tried in order of decreasing satisfaction:

1. brat
2. UAM Corpus
3. GATE
4. MAE

There is exists a recent review paper on annotation tools which also concludes the unavailability of a single best annotation tool and each of them lacks certain features many of the important tools were surprisingly not included in the study.

Answer 1

I use ELAN as my annotation tool of choice - but this is appropriate for Audiovisual transcription (and, to a lesser extent, audio or video alone). The best thing about this is that it's time aligned, and allows you to "pull out" the written transcript for analysis in other programs.

It sounds like you're transcribing and encoding text that is already written, in which case CLAN might be more appropriate for you. Although it was created for the massive CHILDES project, I know people use it for other written transcripts as it allows for good encoding and some analysis within the program. I haven't used it but other people might be able to tell you more about it.