关于brat工具单窗口多标签多选标注功能的技术问询

Great question—this is exactly the kind of workflow tweak that cuts down on annotation fatigue! The good news is you absolutely can assign multiple labels to the same text span in a single workflow, no repeated "New Annotation" windows required. Here’s how to make it work:

Built-in Multi-Select Shortcut #

Brat has a native, underused feature for this:

• Drag to select the target text span you want to annotate.
• Skip clicking the "New Annotation" button—head straight to the left-hand label panel.
• Hold down Ctrl (Windows/Linux) or Cmd (Mac) and click each label you want to assign to the selected span.
• Each click instantly adds the label to the span—no extra windows to open or close mid-annotation.

Optimize Your Schema for Faster Multi-Labeling #

To make this workflow even smoother, tweak your annotation.conf file to group related labels together:

[entities]
Person
Organization
Location
Product

[groups]
EntityCategories = Person, Organization, Location, Product

This clusters your labels into a collapsible group in the panel, making it quicker to find and select multiple related labels at once.

Quick Note for Older Brat Versions #

If the multi-select shortcut doesn’t work for you, you’re probably on an outdated version. This feature was added in a recent stable release—upgrade to the latest version of Brat to unlock this time-saver.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者arsenrosen