[neath](https://github.com/qurator-spk/neath) is a simple, browser-based tool for editing and annotating text with named entities to produce a corpus for training/testing/evaluation. It can be used to add or correct named entity BIO-tags in a TSV file and to correct the token text or segmentation (e.g. due to OCR errors).
[neath](https://github.com/qurator-spk/neath) is developed at the [Berlin State Library](http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/) for data annotation in the context of the [SoNAR-IDH](https://sonar.fh-potsdam.de/) project and the [QURATOR](https://qurator.ai/) project.
[neath](https://github.com/qurator-spk/neath) runs locally as a pure HTML+JavaScript webpage in your web browser. No software needs to be installed, but JavaScript has to be enabled in the browser. Any fairly recent browser should work, but only Chrome and Firefox are tested.
The input data format is based on the format used in the [GermEval2014 Named Entity Recognition Shared Task](https://sites.google.com/site/germeval2014ner/data). Text is encoded as one token per line, with name spans encoded in the BIO-scheme, provided as tab-separated values:
* the first column contains either a `#`, which signals the source the sentence is cited from, or the token position within the sentence
* sentence boundaries are indicated by ``0``
* the second column contains the token text
* outer spans are encoded in the third column
* embedded spans are encoded in the fourth column
Example (simple):
```tsv
No. TOKEN NE-TAG NE-EMB
# https://example.url
1 Donnerstag O O
2 , O O
3 1 O O
4 . O O
5 Januar O O
6 . O O
0 O O
1 Berliner B-ORG B-LOC
2 Tageblatt I-ORG O
3 . O O
0 O O
1 Nr O O
2 . O O
3 1 O O
4 . O O
0 O O
1 Seite O O
2 3 O O
```
For our purposes we extend this format by adding
* a fifth column for an identifier for the outer span from an authority file (in this case, the [GND](https://www.dnb.de/EN/Professionell/Standardisierung/GND/gnd_node.html) is used)
* column six for use as a variable
* finally, columns 7+ are used for storing pixel coordinates for facsimile snippets
[neath](https://github.com/qurator-spk/neath) runs fully locally in the browser. Therefore it can not automatically save any changes you made to disk. You have to use the `Save Changes` button in order to so manually from time to time.
If your browser automatically saves all downloads to your `Downloads` folder, you might want to configure it so that it instead prompts you where to save.
