Programme booklet (pdf)

PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS
Abstract
Search in the Lassy Small Corpus
van Noord, Gertjan and de Kok, Daniel and van der Linde, Jelmer
University of Groningen
A few months ago, the STEVIN Lassy project yielded its most important results: Lassy
Small - a corpus of 1 million words with syntactic annotations which have been
manually verified and corrected, and Lassy Large - a corpus of 1.5 billion words with
automatically assigned syntactic structures. Syntactic annotations include part-ofspeech
tags, lemma and dependency annotations of the type developed earlier in CGN
and D-Coi.
In this presentation we focus on the Lassy Small corpus, and introduce a stand-alone
portable tool called DACT which can be used to browse the syntactic annotations in an
attractive graphical form, and to search for sentences according to a number of search
criteria, which can be specified elegantly by means of search queries formulated in
XPATH, the WWW standard query language for XML documents. We provide a number
of linguistically relevant examples of such queries, and we review the criticism of Lai
and Bird (2010) which they take as motivation to introduce LPATH, an extension of
XPATH. We will argue that such an extension is not required if string positions are
explicitly encoded as XML attributes, as is the case in Lassy Small.
DACT is freely available for various platforms, including Mac OS and recent versions of
Windows.
Corresponding author: g.j.m.van.noord@rug.nl
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