[FLEx] Word Glosses and the definition of a "complete" analysis

[Colin Suggett]

When interlinearizing a text, Flex has a command, "Approve and Jump to Next Incomplete". If I understand correctly, this option only works if the user has assigned a Word Gloss and a Word Category to the word.

 

However, one topic which has been discussed in this list is that there are users who find the Word Gloss line to be both redundant and time consuming to fill in. Such users (myself included), typically hide the Word Gloss line in their interlinear view. Had I understood the implications of my choice way back when, I might have approached things differently, but as it now stands, only a handful of my 17,000+ word forms have the Word Gloss filled in and it is therefore unthinkable to try to complete what is lacking.

 

Nevertheless, I would like to be able to benefit from using the "Jump to Next Incomplete" command. For myself, if I have parsed a word into morphemes, linked the morphemes to lex. entries, and chosen a lex. gloss, and approved the word in the text, that word should be deemed "complete". 

 

Would it be possible to provide a high level interlinear setting whereby a user could opt out of using Word Glosses altogether, and if so, the definition of a "complete" word analysis would correspond to approving the "lex-level" glosses?

-- Colin

[Beth]

"complete" refers to to the fields that are showing. So if you
configure your interlinear to not show Word Glosses, then "complete"
will not take those into account. (There were previous versions of
FLEx where it did count those, even if they weren't showing, but the
last few versions had that fixed.)

However, Word Glosses are useful for things like the Discourse Chart
and the Assign Analysis command in the Words & Texts area. Many
people go along not entering Word Glosses, and then later wish that
they had, because they find these other two things hard to use
without them.

If you have the Word Gloss line showing as you are interlinearizing,
it should be relatively painless to get that populated--it just
guesses the same thing you have for the Lex Gloss. So I recommend
that people leave it showing, even if they don't have much use for it.

Alternatively, there is an SQL query that can be run (in a separate
utility) to populate Word Glosses if you didn't do it the first time
around. It's not perfect, but it can get a lot of them in.

Let us know if you have a current version of FLEx, and "jump to
incomplete" is paying attention to fields other than the ones showing.

-Beth

[Colin Suggett]

Beth,

 

I have the latest version of Flex but am not seeing the same behaviour as you mention below. We'll discuss this further off list.

 

Colin