Upgrading to version v1.3 (Crunchy Frog)

This page provides information on upgrading from older versions of brat to v1.3 (Crunchy Frog).

Excepting a few minor changes (see below), upgrading to brat v1.3 from older versions should only require installing the new version of brat and copying (or linking) your data/ directory from the old version to the new.

brat configuration

The following features, previously set using config.py, are now controlled by settings in tools.conf: sentence splitting, tokenization, annotation validation, and annotation logging. Due to this change, the following settings in config.py are deprecated and no longer have any effect:

    NEWLINE_SS, TOKENIZATION, JAPANESE, ANNOTATION_LOG, PERFORM_VERIFICATION

These features can now be configured in the [options] section in tools.conf using the following settings:

Tokens tokenizer:VALUE, where VALUE=
- whitespace: split by whitespace characters in source text (only)
- ptblike: emulate Penn Treebank tokenization
- mecab: perform Japanese tokenization using MeCab
Sentences splitter:VALUE, where VALUE=
- regex: regular expression-based sentence splitting
- newline: split by newline characters in source text (only)
Validation validate:VALUE, where VALUE=
- all: perform full validation
- none: don't perform any validation
Annotation-log logfile:VALUE, where VALUE=
- <NONE>: no annotation logging
- NAME: log into file NAME (e.g. "/home/brat/work/annotation.log")

For example, the following [options] section gives the default brat configuration before v1.3:

[options]
Tokens	tokenizer:whitespace
Sentences	splitter:regex
Validation	validate:none
Annotation-log	logfile:<NONE>

The following [options] section enables Japanese tokenization using MeCab, sentence splitting only by newlines, full validation, and annotation logging into the given file. (In setting Annotation-log logfile, remember to make sure the web server has appropriate write permissions to the file.)

[options]
Tokens	tokenizer:mecab
Sentences	splitter:newline
Validation	validate:all
Annotation-log	logfile:/home/brat/work/annotation.log

If you find any other issues upgrading to v1.3, please see the troubleshooting page for general instructions and use the brat issue tracker to report any issues.

web server configuration

In cases, a brat server may stop working when upgrading to v1.3. One likely cause of this issue is that version v1.3 features some new access limits for security, which requires permission to limit access in the .htaccess file.

If you have previously set up an older version of brat according to older installation instructions, make sure that you update your httpd.conf file to include AllowOverride Limit for the brat directory.

For example, if your httpd.conf file previously included the line

AllowOverride Options Indexes FileInfo

change this line to read

AllowOverride Options Indexes FileInfo Limit

and then restart apache to read the updated configuration

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload