Carcass Advanced Tutorial - Part 2

Now try using Sort to sort the results alphabetically by match (refer to the basic tutorial if you don't remember how to do that).

You'll notice that there are 25 pages of results, if you want to move directly to a particular page, you can type the page number directly into the box.

Try typing 8 into the box and press enter on your keyboard: you'll be taken directly to page 8 of the result set.

Now let's get back to the Smart Query Editor and try a different query:

• first of all, reset the previous query by clicking on Clear form

• then fill out the form like this:
  • Position 1: in the Lemma box type apply
  • Position 2: in the Part of speech drop-down list select Determiner
  • Position 3: in the Part of speech drop-down list select Noun
  • click on Submit

This query returns all occurrences of the the verb “apply” (in all its inflected forms), followed by a determiner and a noun.

There might be errors in the results (e.g. sometimes the second word will not be a determiner or the third will not be a noun): they are due to inaccuracies in the pos-tagging of the corpus. This kind of errors are to be expected when dealing with automatically tagged corpora (such as the UkWaC corpus we are using in this tutorial).

Here again, sorting results by match could be useful.

In the smart query, it is also possible to specify that a particular position is optional.

For example, we could try to look for the same pattern as before (“apply” followed by a determiner and then by a noun) and specify that we want the determiner to be optional.

We will modify the query we just submitted by ticking the position is optional checkbox in Position 2. If you didn't modify anything after submitting the last query, all you have to do is tick the checkbox marked by the red arrow:

This query will return concordances like “apply makeup” and “apply the policies” because we told the program that position 2 was optional.

If we were interested in finding out what you can do with a “proposal” in English, we could try a query like this

• click on Clear form to reset the form
• Position 1: in the Part of speech drop-down menu select Verb
• Position 2: tick che position is optional checkbox and then select Determiner in the Part of speech drop-down menu
• Position 3: in the Lemma box type proposal

N.B.: this query will probably take more than a few seconds to complete.

The query will return concordances like “made proposals”, “reject the proposal”, etc.

In the next part of the tutorial, you'll learn about the Expert query editor.