Multiple selection of words and batch assign label

[hunnguye]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. One of our annotators suggested support for batch annotation. In certain cases, multiple items with the same label appear close together (in well-structured text). The annotator would like the ability to select all such items and annotate them in a single action, rather than labeling each one individually.

Describe the solution you'd like Multi selection of tokens (i.e. while holding ctrl) and assignment of labels.

Describe alternatives you've considered None.

Additional context We're not sure how feasible this would be to implement. Use cases might be rare, but in our case happened often enough that someone brought it to our attention. One specific example (shown below) involved structured entries where pre-annotation via a recommender system didn't identify all relevant tokens. They needed to be manually highlighted first before labeling.

example (close to real world):

<<date>> title ( hospital_name clinic abbr)
- some details 

<<date>> title (hospital_name clinic abbr)
- some details 
- some details 

<<date>> title (hospital_name clinic abbr)
- some details 

repeated 8 times in total

In this case, hospital_name and clinic abbr were not picked up by the recommender. However, due to the consistent structure, the annotator could easily identify and label these elements, and in this context, reported, that they would have benefitted from multi-selection and batch labeling.

[reckart]

Multi-selection would be a significant refactoring.

What you can currently do though is enable the "remember" checkbox on a feature in the project settings. If you do that, when you create a new annotation, it will assign the value from the previously selected annotation to that value. So if you annotate multiple times the same thing in a row, you only set the feature value on the first one and when you create the next annotation on that layer, the value is already pre-set.

[hunnguye]

Thanks for the blitz reply!

I just found and tested it. Looks promising enough, thanks for the advice.

PS: For anyone who was wondering, where to configure it: The configuration is under
"Settings" > "Layers" > click on relevant layer in "Layers"> click on relevant entry under "Features" > configure checkbox in new appearing "Feature Details"