about brat
brat is an open source project developed collaboratively by researchers from several groups with an interest in text annotation.
This page presents basic information about the project and its origins.
pronunciation
brat is a recursive acronym and thus has no "correct" pronunciation. However, if one is to listen to the developers, it is rather different from the British /bɹat/ and American /bɻæt/. Instead, it is similar to the Serbo-Croatian /brât/. The closest thing to a canonical pronunciation would be what we recorded from our in-house developer of Croatian descent.
developers
The primary brat developers are
- project lead: Sampo Pyysalo (National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and University of Manchester)
- brat server: Pontus Stenetorp (Aizawa laboratory, University of Tokyo)
- brat client: Goran Topić (Research Center for Knowledge Media and Content Science, National Institute of Informatics (NII))
- quality assurance: Tomoko Ohta (National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and University of Manchester)
As with any open-source project brat also owes a lot to a wide range of smaller contributors patching bugs and filing bug reports and feature requests.
For a full, more up-to-date list of contributors, please refer to the CONTRIBUTORS.md file.
contributing
We warmly welcome contributions of code, documentation, bug reports, or any other support to brat. For compatibility, we ask that contributed code be licensed under the MIT license and documentation and similar materials under the CC-BY license. All non-anonymous contributors will be acknowledged in the project documentation.
If you wish to contribute, please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md and feel free to contact the primary developers at any time with your questions.
acknowledging brat
If you use brat in your annotation project or build on the brat codebase, we would appreciate a link to this webpage in materials included with your data or software.
Additionally, we kindly request that scientific publications involving use of the tool cite the following manuscript:
- Pontus Stenetorp, Sampo Pyysalo, Goran Topić, Tomoko Ohta, Sophia Ananiadou and Jun'ichi Tsujii (2012). brat: a Web-based Tool for NLP-Assisted Text Annotation. In Proceedings of the Demonstrations Session at EACL 2012.
In return, if you are using brat in your annotation project, we would be happy to include examples from your annotation and a link to your project in the brat annotation showcase on this website.
The normalisation features of brat were introduced in:
- Pontus Stenetorp, Sampo Pyysalo, Goran Topić, Sophia Ananiadou and Akiko Aizawa. Normalisation with the Brat Rapid Annotation Tool. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine, Zürich, Switzerland, September 2012
a brief history of brat
brat was initially created as an extension of the stav text annotation visualizer, an annotation visualization tool created by Pontus Stenetorp, Goran Topić, Sampo Pyysalo and Tomoko Ohta (then members of the Tsujii laboratory of the University of Tokyo). stav was initially introduced for the visualization of annotations for the BioNLP Shared Task 2011 and presented in the following manuscript:
- Pontus Stenetorp, Goran Topić, Sampo Pyysalo, Tomoko Ohta, Jin-Dong Kim and Jun'ichi Tsujii (2011). BioNLP Shared Task 2011: Supporting Resources. In Proceedings of BioNLP Shared Task 2011 Workshop. (PDF, BIB)
(If you are using brat and can cite one paper, we would prefer it to be for the EACL demo paper referenced above)
acknowledgments
brat development has been supported in part by
- Aizawa laboratory, University of Tokyo (PI: Akiko Aizawa)
- NaCTeM and University of Manchester (PI: Sophia Ananiadou)
- UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) (reference number: BB/G013160/1)
- Tsujii laboratory, University of Tokyo (PI: Jun'ichi Tsujii)
- Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (MEXT, Japan)
