Corpora: New software available

Oliver Mason (oliver@clg.bham.ac.uk)
Mon, 19 Apr 1999 15:45:55 +0100

I am pleased to announce the release of a corpus browser called
`Qwick', which is now available for download from our website at
http://www.clg.bham.ac.uk/QWICK/index.html. Qwick allows you to
construct a working corpus from a set of corpora available on the
computer, retrieve concordance lines from this using a simple but
powerful query language, and to compute collocations with a variety of
adjustable parameter settings.

Qwick is implemented in Java and thus is fully platform independent; it
has been extensively tested on Windows and Solaris. Previously it was
only available through the recently released BNC sampler CD (see
http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/getting/sampler.html), where it comes with
about two million words of pre-indexed data. For obvious reasons the
BNC data is not available for downloading, but on the website you can
find information on how to index your own texts for use with Qwick.

Qwick has been designed specifically to be easy to use, and through the
use of a full inverted index it is extremely fast to retrieve concordance
lines even from large corpora. It is an application built using a system
for corpus storage and retrieval, called CUE, which has been developed in
Birmingham over the last few years by John Sinclair and myself.

Oliver Mason

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