[Mat-annotation-users] Announcing the availability of the MITRE Annotation Toolkit, version 3.0.5

[Samuel B. <sa...@mi...>]

All -

My colleagues and I are pleased to announce the availability of version
3.0.5 of the MITRE Annotation Toolkit.

What is it?
-----------

MAT is a suite of cooperating, loosely-coupled tools for supporting the
human annotator in constructing models and corpora for computational
linguistics and analysis, especially using the iterative "tag a little,
learn a little" workflow. MAT includes MITRE's open source Java Carafe 
CRF trainer/tagger; a Web-based annotation and process control UI; a 
flexible and powerful scorer; an XML-configurable experiment harness; a 
workflow manager; and more.

MAT is platform-independent, open source, and compatible (with some
effort) with multiple trainer/tagger engines and hand annotation tools.

You can learn about MAT 3.0, and download it, at

http://mat-annotation.sf.net

What's new in version 3.0?
--------------------------

MAT 3.0 provides significant improvements for maintainers and annotators 
of complex multi-step annotation tasks, such as those requirement 
multiple mixed-initiative annotation steps. It also features a general 
and powerful hand reconciliation tool which works with relation and 
event annotations.

How stable is it?
-----------------

For many years, MAT has served as the underpinning of MITRE's
Identification Scrubber Toolkit (MIST), an open-source package for
deidentification of free-text medical documents. As MIST, it has been 
used by a wide range of researchers in this area. While the features of 
MAT 3.0 have not been exploited in MIST, and there is no 3.0 version of 
MIST, MAT itself continues to be used extensively by MITRE in its 
internal research and development projects, and by a variety of MITRE's 
sponsors.

Is it supported?
----------------

Unfortunately, no. MITRE doesn't (currently) have the resources to 
provide public open-source support. The MITRE developers subscribe to 
this mailing list, but we likely won't have the resources to answer.

On the other hand, MAT was under development for almost eight years, and 
has seen a good deal of use, and comes with a ton of documentation.

Future work
-----------

This is the terminal version of MAT. We may occasionally provide bug-fix 
releases, but no major additions are planned.

Cordially,
Sam Bayer
The MITRE Corporation
sa...@mi...