Carcass Advanced Tutorial - Part 2

Note also that the query you just submitted was added to the Query history, just like the simple query you submitted using the Simple Query Editor.

Now let's 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.

It is also possible to use multiple constraints on a single position. If we wanted to look for verbs starting with “under” followed by an optional determiner and then a noun, we could compose a query like this:

• click on Clear form
• Position 1: in the Word box type under.* (note the dot before the asterisk), in the “Part of speech” drop-down menu select Verb
• Position 2: in the “Part of speech” drop-down menu select Determiner, tick the Position is optional checkbox
• Position 3: in the “Part of speech” drop-down menu select Noun
• click on Submit

The query will return concordances such as “undertaken change” and “understand the complexities”. You should note that the syntax we used here for the asterisk is different from the one we used in the first example of the tutorial: here we used .* instead of a simple asterisk to represent any sequence of characters. This inconsistency will probably be resolved in future versions of the software.

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