The logical layout of hte corpus is stored in the CorpusLayout.tsv file as a tab-separated values table.

At the bottom of this page is an example of the CorpusLayout.tsv file. It consists of three columns labeled Key, Value, and Description separated by tabs.

•  Key The logical name of the component. Documentation/Speakers is a top directory Documentation and a sub-directory Speakers. This directory will receive the Speaker meta-data.
•  Value The real path of the component. This can be any directory inside the corpus, with any name. It can be nested inside other directories. When NCB tries to access this component, it will simply append this path to the root of the corpus.
•  Description A description of the component for the benefit of anyone who tries to understand the structure of the corpus.

NCB divides a corpus in four logical components. Each component is subdivided into parts again. The corresponding directories will be created when they are absent. If the value of a part is empty (or -), the corresponding part will not exist for NCB, and not created when NCB opens the corpus. So, if a corpus has no Recordings component, all the values for the Recordings/ keys should be empty. The logical components are:

•  Documentation All documentation about the corpus
•  Recordings The, raw, initial recordings as made in the field (original recordings might be removed)
•  Corpus The corpus proper
•  Evaluation Any additional human evaluation done on the corpus

Except for the Documentation, each logical component of a corpus contains at least four logical subdivisions:

•  Media The recordings
•  Info The meta-data as tab-separated key-value file (tsv)
•  Annotations Annotations are stored as Praat TextGrid files
•  Texts Any textual data connected to the recordings
•  Overlays Stand-off annotations, Corpus part only

The Corpus part contains an Overlays directory (Corpus/Overlays) which stores stand-off annotations (wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Stand-off_markup). Each separate set of stand-off markup is stored in a separate sub-tree under Corpus/Overlays. Note that logically this is a subdirectory of the Corpus part, but it is stored default next to the Corpus directory.

Note: Adding Recordings/Overlays or Evaluation/Overlays to the CorpusLayout.tsv file will generate these overlay directories automatically.

The Evaluation part also contains some extra parts:

•  Experiments Control files and content used to run evaluation experiments
•  Responses The actual response files from the evaluations

A central principle of NCB is that files related to a certain media file, ie, meta-data, annotations, and text files, are stored in parallel directory paths. That is, if there is a recording in Corpus/Media/my/path/to/a/recording.wav, then the following files correspond to each other:

•  Corpus/Media/my/path/to/a/recording.wav Recording
•  Corpus/Info/my/path/to/a/recording.tsv Meta-data of file
•  Corpus/Annotations/my/path/to/a/recording.TextGrid Annotations of file
•  Corpus/Texts/my/path/to/a/recording.txt Texts

In these paths, the bold parts, Corpus/Media, Corpus/Info, Corpus/Annotations, and Corpus/Texts are logical names. The real names of these directories are taken from the CorpusLayout.tsv table. The part reading /my/path/to/a/recording. in these paths are identical for all four of the files.

Default CorpusLayout.tsv

Links to this page

• NKI-CorpusBuilder (EN)