Displaying long-distance relations

[s2fische]

Displaying relations, especially long-distance ones that span over several sentences/lines and if there are more than one in the same part of a document, quickly becomes very confusing and illegible which thus makes it harder to find the start and end points that a relation connects to. Even if anything but entities and relations is hidden. See for example the relation "Sonstige Merkmalsopposition | hell vs. finster" in the second and third screenshots, which starts in line 9 and ends in line 54, so you have to aimlessly scroll a lot to even find the source and target annotations.

We were wondering if there was any way to make relations more overseeable, especially in curation mode: Would it be possible to make a special mode that you can enable in settings as you need it, which makes it so that only the relations and their corresponding source and target annotations (plus maybe a few words to the right and left of them) are shown, while the text between the source and target annotations is shrunk or hidden or replaced by three dots, or something like that?

[reckart]

It would be quite tricky to hide intermediary text between the relation endpoints.

Please try the following:

• in the layer settings, change the render mode of the relation layer from always to when selected

• When you select a relation, note the blue crosshair icons next to source and target in the right sidebar. Clicking on either of these will take you directly to the endpoint and also scroll the editor viewport accordingly

• Also, in the left annotation overview sidebar, when you group by position, you will find relations and their target endpints sorted under the respective source endpoints

[reckart]

Have you been able to try the suggested approach?

[s2fische]

Thank you for the suggestions!

We've so far tried the second and third ones, but they don't really make looking for relations and their source/target that much easier.

The second suggestion works great if you’re just annotating, but not for curation because if you select the relation in order to see its details in the right sidebar, you automatically merge it as well, which we do not want – we first want to look at its source and target (in their context) before deciding whether to merge it or not.

The third suggestion also does not work very well in curation because the colour of relations that have not been merged yet (i.e., the ones we're looking for) is the same as the colour of any other unmerged span etc., so they're still rather hard to find. It would be helpful if filtering for the kind of layer were possible while "Group by position" is selected. Additionally, using this idea, we still have to alternate between the left sidebar and the text whenever relations are linked to entities that have not been merged yet. Maybe there could be a function that when you select a relation to merge it, the source and/or target are automatically merged as well.

[reckart]

Did you notice the new display of relations in the annotation sidebar in the Group by layer mode? Does it help in this case?

[s2fische]

No, it still looks the same for me:

But yes, that does look helpful!

[reckart]

The change is included in INCEpTION 34.0 - the current version is 34.1.

[s2fische]

We have now updated INCEpTION and it is indeed a very helpful feature, thank you!