CATMA

CATMA (Computer Assisted Textual Markup and Analysis) is a practical and intuitive tool for text researchers. In CATMA, users can combine the hermeneutic, ‘undogmatic’ and the digital, taxonomy based approach to text and corpora – as a single researcher, or in real-time collaboration with other team members.

CATMA’s Analyzer module supports the generation of Wordlists amongst its key automated functions. A wordlist displays all the words contained in users’ text, arranged in alphabetical order or according to their frequency in the text. Users can select an individual word and inspect the different contexts in which it was used in the “KWIC” (keyword in context) pane.

The CATMA Analyzer allows users to execute Queries on a text. Users can search the text for words, phrases, tags, or Properties, making users’ query as complex and specific as necessary, e.g. asking for the listing of a certain word only if it appears in a certain adjacency, or excluding certain results from the listing.

CATMA’s Tagger component enables users to annotate texts for the purpose of analysis. Annotation is done by highlighting parts of users’ text and then assigning Tag Types to them – so users don’t have to physically insert a Tag into the text. Users can either choose Tag Types from an existing Tag Set or create new Tag Types while annotating.

Every assignment of a Tag Type allows users to choose individual values for its Properties. In the context of the heureCLÉA project, CATMA has been extended with another possibility for large-scale annotation. Instead of requiring manual effort for all types of annotations, natural language processing (NLP) is harnessed to generate automatically created annotations for specific tasks.