Updating initials in ELAN tiers

author: Sasha Wilmoth date: 2017-06-01

tags: - Elan - Python

categories: - Scripts - Tutorials

Introduction

If you use speaker’s initials in tier names in ELAN, you might need to update them occasionally. You can do this manually in ELAN by clicking Tier > Change Tier Attributes, and then typing in the new initials for every single tier.

If that’s too time-consuming, you can use changeSpeakerInitials.py. This is a simple Python script I wrote for Ruth Singer. Ruth had multiple participants in her corpus with the same initials - let’s call them Mickey Mouse (MM) and Minnie Mouse (MM).

The tiers look something like this: 

changeSpeakerInitials.py

Requirements

changeSpeakerInitials.py works with Python 2.7. It works on Mac, and has not been tested on Windows.

The script can be found here.

Instructions

Instead of manually changing each tier in each file to MM1 and MM2, we can make a two-column (tab-delimited) file like this:

New Initials | Name — | — MM1 | Mickey Mouse MM2 | Minnie Mouse

The command is:

changeSpeakerInitials.py [-h] Speaker_initials.txt /path/to/your/corpus

The script looks at who the participants are in each file, and changes the initials in the tier name according to the speaker database. So ‘rf@MM’ becomes either ‘rf@MM1’ or ‘rf@MM2’.

Any updated ELAN files are put into a new directory called UpdatedInitials.

The script also prints an error message if it finds any names not in the speaker/initial file, as well as the file(s) that each name was found in.

Note: The script finds the initials to replace by looking for capital letters or numbers following an @ symbol in the tier name.