Offset annotation support

Offset Annotation File Format

Format of the offset annotation file: 8-column, tab-delimited. From left-to-right, those columns are:

docno

external document id corresponding to the document in which the annotation occurs.

type

TAG or ATTRIBUTE

id

an id number for the annotation; each line should have a unique id >= 1.

name

for TAG, name or type of the annotation for ATTRIBUTE, the attribute name, or key

start

start and length define the annotation's extent. The values should be in token position offsets

length

meaningless for an ATTRIBUTE. The number of tokens the annotation spans.

value

for TAG, an INT64 for ATTRIBUTE, a string that is the attribute's value

parentid

for TAG, refers to the id number of another TAG to be considered the parent of this one; this is how hierarchical annotations can be expressed. a TAG that has no parent has parentid = 0 for ATTRIBUTE, refers to the id number of a TAG to which it belongs and from which it inherits its start and length. *NOTE: the file must be sorted such that any line that uses a given id in this column must be *after* the line that uses that id in the id column.

debug

ignored by the OffsetAnnotator; can contain any information that is beneficial to a human reading the file