TimeAlign is a web application designed for cross-linguistic research using parallel corpora.
It provides:
- An annotation interface where similar forms in aligned phrases can be collected by a team of one or more annotators.
- Descriptive statistics and multiple visualization methods for cross-linguistic variation data.
A short demo of the annotation interface is available here
TimeAlign was created as part of the Time in Translation research project. For more information, see the project website.
TimeAlign is created with the Django web framework and requires Python 3.
After installing the dependencies for the MySQL database driver (see below), you can install the required python packages by running pip install -r requirements.txt
If you want to use MySQL as your database backend (recommended) use the following commands to install a database server and the required packages for the python client.
sudo yum install mariadb-server mariadb-devel python3-devel
sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
sudo apt-get install python3-dev default-libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev mysql-server
# Clone the repository
git clone [repository URL]
cd timealign/
# NOTE! When using Pycharm, .env cannot be recognized as a virtual environment folder. Use 'venv' instead.
# Create a virtual environment
sudo apt-get install virtualenv
virtualenv .env
source .env/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Create a database and change the databases section in timealign/settings.py accordingly
## Setup database: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-getting-started/en/#mysql-getting-started-installing
## Create user: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/creating-accounts.html
# Migrate the database
## Create project db setting
cp ./timealign/settings_secret_default.py ./timealign/settings_secret.py
## Update information in the 'settings_secret.py', then execute migrate script
python manage.py migrate
# Initialize revisions
python manage.py createinitialrevisions
# Run the tests
python manage.py test
If the test runs OK, you should be ready to roll! Run the webserver using:
# Start the (local) web server
python manage.py runserver
During debugging, we additionally use the Django Debug Toolbar. Install it with:
pip install django-debug-toolbar
And then uncomment the lines referring to the toolbar in timealign/settings.py.
You can find ERD diagrams of the applications in doc/models.
General information on the Time in Translation-project can be found on our website.
If you happen to have used (parts of) this project for your research, please refer to this paper:
van der Klis, M., Le Bruyn, B., de Swart, H. (2017). Mapping the Perfect via Translation Mining. Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers 2017, 497-502.