Piaf

Piaf is an open-source QA (question answering) annotation plateform.
It handles the following features:

• nice UI (conceived by a designer)
• contributor enrollment (signup & mail validation)
• contributor certification (by any member of the admin team)
• admin team administration (by the super-admin)
• input/output of texts to be annotated using the SQuAD format
• users scoring (for bot and troll removal)
• annotations managment

1. Installation

First clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/etalab/piaf.git
cd piaf

Then create the environment variables (you can customise your API keys and passwords):

cp .env-example .env

Now you have two options: install the app with Docker or without

Installing with Docker

As a prerequisite, you need to have installed Docker & Docker-compose on your computer.

Then, type:

docker-compose pull

Installing without

See the dedicated README_without_docker

2. Running

Running with Docker

make up

Note that it takes a few minutes to be up and running.
Have a look at the Makefile for more details

Running without

See the dedicated README_without_docker

3. Setting up your annotation campaign

Reach the Admin panel

Open your web-browser at http://127.0.0.1:8000/login/ and login with the admin you created above (username: "admin", password: "password")

You will then be able to reach the admin panel, for any administration task you may require: 127.0.0.1:8000/admin

Import texts

We designed a simple interface for you to upload in an easy way your texts you want to annotate. It's located here: /app/admin

Here is an example of input dataset: Click here to download

As you can see in the example above, texts have to match the SQuAD format. But, for additional app options, we accept some extra fields:

• "categorie" : can be one of the followings - 'Religion', 'Géographie', 'Histoire', 'Sport', 'Arts', 'Société', 'Sciences' default to 'Société' if empty
• "displaytitle" : if you need a more deligthful title (falls back to title if empty)
• "reference" : integer like 7138870 for Wikipedia reference (falls back to 0 if empty)

4. Annotation campaign

Simply reach: app/
And give your users this URL so they can begin to annotate.

Here what is may look like:

Admin section

To manage users, you can reach the admin dashboard: admin/

5. Export results

Once you have some annotated texts, you may want to download them so you can train your own QA model for instance. Please, download the result on the page : app/admin

6. Configuration

- General configuration

Passing most settings as environment variable will override the default settings. Here are some of the variable customisable:

DJANGO_ALLOW_SIGNUP=True # Allow users to singup (for crowdsourcing)
DJANGO_USE_MAILJET=False # use Mailjet or the native Django mail service
DJANGO_MAILJET_API_KEY=ffdfsfcfs2a00ad5ef367bfdsflsdk # put your Mailjet API key here, this is an example resulting in Errors
DJANGO_MAILJET_SECRET_KEY=nhf41cc0d45ffsdfs6fdsfdsffdsfsf # put your Mailjet API secret here, this is an example resulting in Errors
MATOMO_SITE_ID= # Matomo id
WEBPACK_ENVIRONMENT_PRODUCTION=False # build the frontend  or run a 'npm run serve'

with Docker

Edit the .env file

without

See the dedicated README_without_docker

- Special Configuration for the VueJS app

There are some specific settings in a second .env file (it was simpler for us to keep two files). These settings are directly related with the frontend options. You will find it at this location: src/piaf/front/.env

VUE_APP_ALLOW_ONBOARDING=true # Redirect new users to an onboarding process to teach them how to annotate a text
VUE_APP_PRINT_BRAVO=false # Option to hide the "Bravo" page after questions are submitted

Troubleshooting & Contact

Feel free to submit any feedback here.

Run VueJS app alone

It's possible to run the frontend application by itself. For this to work out, you will need:

• change base: '/app' into base: '/' in the file src/piaf/front/src/router.js
• make sure publicPath: '/' in the file src/piaf/front/vue.config.js
• to go to this folder src/piaf/front & run npm run watch
• and start your server from src/piaf/static/front where npm builds the app.

Acknowledgements

PIAF plateform was originally inspired by Doccano. The PIAF team contributed to Doccano repository until the Doccano project was to far from PIAF needs.

License

2018 chakki.
2019 DINUM, Guillim.
2020 DINUM, Guillim.
2021 DINUM, Guillim.

This application is published under the MIT license.