Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

@Options and Per-File Command Scoping

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-09-05 04:22 EDT

CHAT files can carry an @Options: header that scopes which batchalign3 commands are allowed to run on them. The two values batchalign3 reads are CA and NoAlign. They are independent directives, each scoped to a specific command, they are not a generic “skip everything” flag.

@Options: CA: skip morphotag

A Conversation Analysis transcript. By default, @Options: CA means “the morphotag command is not to be run on this file.” CA transcripts use a separate convention for prosodic and discourse annotation that does not benefit from automatic POS / dependency analysis, and any %mor / %gra written by morphotag would be at best noise.

batchalign3’s behavior on a @Options: CA file:

  • morphotag: pass-through. The file’s existing %mor / %gra (if any) is preserved unchanged. No Stanza inference. No provenance comment is added.
  • All other commands, run normally.

Corpus reconstruction can make a different, explicit choice with --ca-policy analyze. That policy runs morphotag while preserving the @Options: CA header. It exists for a documented source-to-publication rebuild where automatic morphology is part of the intended edition, such as reconstructing MICASE material whose published derivative already carries %mor. The default remains honor; a routine invocation never overrides the transcript declaration silently.

@Options: NoAlign: skip the align command

@Options: NoAlign literally means “the align command in batchalign3 is not to run on this file.” NoAlign is scoped to forced alignment specifically. The directive came from the era when audio bullets in CHAT could be word-level or utterance-level; a NoAlign file declares that its audio bullets cover whole utterances and should not be re-aligned to individual word boundaries by FA.

batchalign3’s behavior on a @Options: NoAlign file:

  • align: pass-through. No Whisper, no DP alignment, no rewriting of timing markers.
  • morphotag: runs normally. NoAlign has nothing to do with the text-level morphological analysis that morphotag performs. (Prior to 2026-05-07, the morphotag pipeline incorrectly conflated NoAlign with a global skip; this caused 297 corpus files to accumulate stale %mor / %gra from old buggy runs with no rerun path. The fix restores the orthogonal scoping the directive was always meant to have.)
  • All other commands, run normally.

Combining CA and NoAlign

A file may carry both: @Options: CA, NoAlign. Under the default CA policy, the directives remain orthogonal: CA skips morphotag, NoAlign skips align, and any other command runs. --ca-policy analyze changes only the morphotag decision; NoAlign continues to govern alignment independently.

What the directives are NOT

They are not a generic “this file is special, leave it alone” flag. They are not a substitute for setting --lang or --skip-* flags. They scope batchalign3 commands by name, deliberately, per the CHAT manual’s per-file convention. New batchalign3 commands should not extend or repurpose these directives without an explicit specification update.

  • CHAT manual: https://talkbank.org/0info/manuals/CHAT.html (search for “Options” in the headers reference).
  • crates/batchalign/src/pipeline/morphosyntax.rs, where the submitted CaMorphotagPolicy and parsed header produce one typed per-file disposition consumed by all downstream stages.
  • crates/batchalign/src/fa/mod.rs: the align-side gate (is_no_align).

This page last changed: 2026-09-05 (commit 73f146d4). The whole book last changed: 2026-09-16 (commit 34d249d8).