Stuttgart corpus tools

 

The IMS Corpus Workbench is an extremely useful tool for data-intensive linguistic applications. It was developed by various people at Stuttgart's Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung. You can find information about the IMS Corpus Workbench on their web page: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/Tools/CorpusTools.html You will also find information there about how to download the workbench, and conditions of use.

In Edinburgh, the software has already been downloaded and installed. To use it, make sure you are logged in to burns and then set the following environment variables:

burns: setenv UHOME /usr/local/ims-cwb
burns: set path = ($UHOME/bin $UHOME/uid $path)
burns: setenv CORPUS_REGISTRY $UHOME/registry
burns: setenv MANPATH $UHOME/man:$MANPATH

You can now start the workbench by just typing xkwic to the UNIX prompt.

There are two sides to the IMS Corpus Tools: CQP, the Corpus Query Processor); and XKWIC, a graphical user interface for running queries on a corpus and manipulating the results of a query. The tools come with some documentation, which is unfortunately slightly out of date. In the following sections we will introduce XKWIC and CQP by means of some examples, and explain enough of their functionality to allow you to understand the manuals.

To be able to follow the following sections, it is important you have XKWIC up and running.