Carcass Advanced Tutorial

(by Eros Zanchetta)

This tutorial is based on Carcass version 0.44

Welcome to the Carcass Advanced tutorial!

Prerequisites

This guide assumes you already completed the basic tutorial. If you haven't done it already, we recommend you complete it and then come back here.

Click here to open the basic tutorial.

Introduction

To begin this tutorial, follow these steps:

start Carcass and connect to the server

in the Corpus Selector click on “English”

click on UkWaC 1

Using the asterisk

Let's say you want to look for words that begin with “under” (such as “under”, “underneath”, “understand”, etc.)

You can easily do this in Carcass using the asterisk.1) the correct term for this is actually “Kleene star operator”, but we'll just call it asterisk to keep things simple

Type this query in the Simple Query box and click on Submit:

under*

The query will return results like “under”, “underpinning”, “underside” etc.

N.B.: this simplified use of the asterisk only applies to the Simple Query Editor, the Smart and Expert query editors use a slightly different syntax. This may change in the future.

The Smart Query Editor

In this section you'll learn how to use the Smart Query Editor, a special editor that allows you to compose queries which exploit corpus annotation (things like part-of-speech tags and lemma).

Select the Smart Query Editor.

The Smart query editor will open. If your computer has a small screen it may look like this:

You may want to maximise the application window at this point. Remember also that you can drag the separators to redistribute the space in the application (see the basic tutorial for more info on this).

The application should look more or less like this at this point (you should be able to see all the elements in the Smart Query Editor):

The smart editor contains three Position descriptors, each of these represents the constraint you want to put on a word in your query. You don't need to use all three positions in your query, nor do you need to use all the options offered by the editor (more on this later).

For instance, let's say that you want to look for examples of use of the verb “apply” (in all its inflected forms) in the UkWaC corpus.

In the Lemma box of Position 1 type:

apply

leave everything else untouched and click on Submit.

In a few seconds the results will appear and you'll notice that they also include inflected forms of the verb “apply” (i.e. “applying”, “applied”, “applies”, etc.)

In the next part of the tutorial you'll learn more about the Smart Query Editor.

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