EZCAT: an Easy Conversation Annotation Tool

This online annotation tool was first fully dedicated to the annotation campaign made at Télécom Paris and SNCF. While the annotation campaign is over, this annotation tool is still hosted online. We refactored the tool and made it into a customizable applciation dedicated to conversation annotation. We also added some features such as the import of instant messaging applications' conversation in order to enable their easy annotation.

Live Version

https://gguibon.github.io/ezcat/

New feature on EZCAT 1.2.0

EZCAT 1.2.0 comes with one requested feature: local storage for the annotaion config. You can now decide to either save the configuration on memory (which disappear upon closing the tab), or save / erase the configuration from the local storage of your browser. This prevents having to load the configuration file everytime.

New features on EZCAT 1.1.0

EZCAT 1.1.0 comes with some new features:

• multilabel at the message level
• multiple label types at the message level
• new message level display (chips), customizable for each label (listselect or chip). Chips are now the default display for message level labels as it allows a faster annotation process
• fix: intermediate display on big phones. Now the labels are always visible even in intermediate to small screens
• fix: the app will automatically fix the underlaying data representation to correspond to multilabels for message labels

Who is using it?

EZCAT is used by:

• Mingi Shin et al. 2024

If you are using EZCAT and want to appear in the following list, just send me an email with one sentence about your usage!

Citation

If you found this work useful, please cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{guibon-2022-ezcat,
    title = "EZCAT: an Easy Conversation Annotation Tool",
    author = {Guibon, Ga{\"e}l  and
      Labeau, Matthieu  and
      Lefeuvre, Luce  and
      Clavel, Chlo{\'e}},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = june,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    abstract = "Users generate content constantly, leading to new data requiring annotation. Among this data, textual conversations are created every day and come with some specificities: they are mostly private through instant messaging applications, requiring the conversational context to be labeled. These specificities led to several annotation tools dedicated to conversation, and mostly dedicated to dialogue tasks, requiring complex annotation schemata, not always customizable and not taking into account conversation-level labels. In this paper, we present EZCAT, an easy-to-use interface to annotate conversations in a two-level configurable schema, leveraging message-level labels and conversation-level labels at once. Our interface is characterized by the voluntary absence of a server and accounts management, enhancing its availability to anyone, and the control over data, which is crucial to confidential conversations. We also present our first usage of EZCAT along with our annotation schema we used to annotate confidential customer service conversations. EZCAT is freely available at https://gguibon.github.io/ezcat",
    language = "English",
}

Install the dependencies

npm install

Start the app in development mode (hot-code reloading, error reporting, etc.)

quasar dev

Build the app for production

quasar build

Customize the configuration

See Configuring quasar.conf.js.

Electron Builds for Desktop Installers

See Reference

quasar build -m electron -t [linux|macOS]

Then cd to

cd dist/electron/UnPackaged

sudo apt install fakeroot

npx electron-packager . ezcat --platform [linux|darwin] --arch x64 --out dist/

where app is the name of the application (poc for instance)

package for debian

electron-installer-debian --src dist/ezcat-linux-x64/ --dest dist/installers/ --arch amd64

package for mac OS

electron-installer-dmg dist/ezcat-darwin-x64/ezcat.app dist/installers/ --icon img/ezcatfavicon.png --title EZCAT --out dist/installers/

Cordova Builds for Mobile Installers

package for android

quasar build -m cordova -T android
cd src-cordova/
npm install cordova-android
cd ..
quasar build -m cordova -T android

to finish

Improvements Coming Soon

• local storage for configuration file (optional)
• project dedicated README
• separated technical README
• wiki/docs for usage
• provide native installers

Contacts

Application made by Gaël Guibon