.. meta:: :description: Orange Textable documentation, Uses of annotating segmentations :keywords: Orange, Textable, documentation, annotations, uses The uses of annotating segmentations ==================================== Annotations are bits of information attached to text segments. They let you go beyond what's in the text, and extend Orange Textable's analytic capacities from textual content to user-provided interpretative information and metadata. In Orange Textable, an *annotation* is a piece of information attached to a segment. Annotations consist of two parts : *key* and *value* . For instance, in the now classical case of the word segmentation of *a simple example* (see :ref: `figure 1` below), segment *simple* could be associated with the annotation *{part of speech : adjective}*; this annotation's key is *part of speech* and its value is *adjective* . .. _uses_annotating_segmentations_fig1 : .. figure:: figures/a_simple_example_adjective.png :align: center :alt: example annotations :scale: 80 % Figure 1 : Annotating *simple* as an adjective. A segment can have zero, one, or several annotations attached to it. The same segment could be simultaneously associated with another annotation such as *{word category : lexical}* , or any *{key : value}* pair deemed relevant. .. _uses_annotating_segmentations_fig2 : .. figure:: figures/a_simple_example_annotations2.png :align: center :alt: segments with various annotations :scale: 80 % Figure 2 : Segments with various annotations Note that annotations keys are unique : Since they serve to recognize various annotation values attached to a single segment, annotation keys cannot be duplicated within the segment. On :ref: `figure 2 ` above, "simple" can only have one value at a time for key "category" . Even though we have carefully ignored them so far, annotations play a fundamental role in text data processing and analysis. They make it possible to go beyond the basic level of forms that are "physically" present in a text and tap into the more abstract--and often more interesting--level of the *interpretation* of these forms. For instance, the texts composing a given corpus could be annotated with respect to their genre ( *novel* , *short story* , and so on), and the parts of these texts might be annotated with regard to their discourse type ( *narrative* , *description* , *dialogue* , and so on). Such data could be exploited to study the distribution of discourse types as a function of genre, which would be at best extremely difficult, if ever possible, without having encoded the relevant information by means of annotations. In the following section, we will see a simple method for creating annotations in Orange Textable using the :ref: `Merge` widget, and then various ways of exploiting such annotations.