Extract text from ANN files
To convert your ANN file to another format, you need brat rapid annotation tool or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "NLP Annotation Data" file type, you need software like brat rapid annotation tool or a similar tool.
The .ann extension is a notoriously ambiguous filename used by over a dozen different applications to store 'annotations' - metadata linked to another file. The most common variant is the Brat Annotation File, generated by the brat rapid annotation tool. In this format, the .ann file relies on a 'standoff' architecture: it contains coordinates and labels (e.g., entity extraction tags) but not the actual text, which resides in a separate sibling txt file. Without its partner file or specialized NLP software, a Brat .ann file is just a meaningless list of alphanumeric codes (e.g., T1 Person 0 5 John).
Other common variants include ABBYY Lingvo dictionary modifications, legacy Windows Help annotations, and Adobe Acrobat sidecar files. This fragmentation creates a major headache: generic text editors can open them, but the content is often unstructured garbage or proprietary code. To make this data usable, users typically convert Brat files to JSON or XML for machine learning pipelines, or merge document-based annotations into standard PDF or DOCX files for archiving.
Convert.Guru analyzes your ANN file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted ANBN, LSD, MAT, QUERY, JQX and MP4 files.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our ANN converter.