CHAT2ELAN – CHAT to ELAN XML Conversion
Status: Current
Purpose
Converts CHAT files into ELAN annotation format (.eaf). The output is a valid ELAN XML file with time-aligned tiers and annotations derived from CHAT main tiers and their timing bullets.
See the CLAN manual for the original CHAT2ELAN command documentation.
Usage
chatter clan chat2elan file.cha
chatter clan chat2elan --media-extension wav file.cha
CLAN Equivalence
| CLAN command | Rust equivalent |
|---|---|
chat2elan +e.wav file.cha | chatter clan chat2elan file.cha |
Options
| Option | CLAN Flag | Description |
|---|---|---|
--media-extension <EXT> | +e.EXT | Include a MEDIA_DESCRIPTOR element referencing a media file with the same basename and the given extension |
Without --media-extension, the output omits media references.
Output
A standard-compliant EAF 3.0 XML file. Each CHAT speaker becomes an ELAN tier (using the full speaker code as tier ID). Utterances with timing bullets become time-aligned annotations. The time slot pool is derived from all utterance start/end timestamps.
Differences from CLAN
- CLAN requires the
+eflag to specify a media extension; the Rust version omits media references by default. - Uses typed AST traversal for utterance extraction rather than text parsing.
- Generates standard-compliant EAF 3.0 XML.
- Speaker codes are used directly as tier IDs (no truncation).