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Crossing Boundaries through Corpora: Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Patricia Ronan, Theresa Neumaier, Andreas Weilinghoff and Lisa Westermayer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 119] 2024
► pp. 248–262

Chapter 10
Query a corpus in near-natural language

A human-friendly corpus query language not only for linguists

| Charles University in Prague,
| Charles University in Prague,
This paper addresses the pressing issue of accessibility of corpora to users who are not able or willing to learn a formal query language. It introduces a working online automatic translator from a near-natural language into the Corpus Query Language (CQL), as used in SketchEngine, Czech National Corpus web applications, and other services. The translator does not require strict syntactical patterns and allows for a certain amount of typing errors, using the redundancy associated with natural language. It allows querying corpora of 35 languages hosted by the Czech National Corpus infrastructure, all of them annotated in the Universal Dependencies formalism. Alternatively, the translated CQL code can be employed in other compatible systems. The paper both presents the theoretical assumptions of our solution and outlines the details of its implementation, including examples of use.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, corpus, query language, large language models, universal dependencies formalism, Czech national corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Example queries
  • 4.Examples of use outside linguistics
  • 5.Testing
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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References (19)
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