Part Two: Using Xaira to explore corpora Richard Xiao

2 Outline of the talk Concordance Wordlist Keywords (No) Output formats Manipulating results Collocation/colligation Distribution analysis Live demonstration Tips for keeping away from bugs Multilingual dimension Xaira FAQs

3 Concordance Word query ( ) Search for a word Phrase/Quick query ( or ) Searching for a word or phrase Addkey query ( ) POS or lemma search Pattern query ( ) Regular Expression search XML query ( ) Search for XML markup CQL/XQL query ( ) Searching using XML-based Corpus Query Language Query builder ( ) A powerful combination of all query types

4 Wordlist In Client >> Word query (up to 100,000 lexicon entries): sorting alphabetically, by frequency, or the number of forms In Xaira Indexer Tools >> Tools >> Indexer >> Options >> Create frequency table

5 Keyword? Sadly, no – Use WordSmith instead WordSmith version 4.0 fully supports Unicode

6 Output formats Page mode vs. Line mode (KWIC) Plain text vs. XML text Scope of context Alignment (left, right, top, bottom) Reference (on the status bar)

7 Manipulating results Edit query (to save time for related queries) Bibliographical data Sort KWIC concordances Select/block select/copy concordances Right click on a concordance Thin/edit concordances Random sampling Save queries and export them in XML Print results

8 Collocation/colligation ( ) Statistical measure (MI or Z) Window span Minimum frequency Minimum MI/Z score Top N collocates Computing collocation statistics for individual words Applying selected lemmata Colligation (Addkey tags)

9 Distribution analysis ( ) Defining partition (subcorpora) (Texts >> Column control to select XML tags) Texts >> Define partition (3 ways) Based on selected class, values in a column, or solutions to a query Texts >> Open partition Tabulation (text class, words, hits, %, etc) Normalised frequencies for subcorpora Sorting tabulated data Graphic presentation (pie/bar chart) Save distribution data in various forms Copy pie/bar chart

10 Additional features of Xaira Annotating concordances (making notes) Copying query text or notes User-defined stylesheet Colour book (e.g. different colours for different POS categories) Remote access over a network Platform-independent

11 Xaira live demonstration Here we go… …slides to follow

12 Tips for keeping away from bugs In the Line mode, a maximum of 1,524 concordances are displayed See the rest in the Page mode In Query builder, joining query nodes in the horizontal direction (OR) and then in the vertical direction (AND) may produce unreliable counts when the Link type is specified as One-way or Two-way Only define Link type as Next or Not next If thousands of hits are downloaded and dozens of them are deleted by reverse selection in thinning, the system may crash If concordances have been sorted/edited, a saved query may not be opened again Save the edited concordances as an XML list using Query – Listing in the menu or pressing on the toolbar

13 Truly multilingual - Chinese

14 Truly multilingual - Bengali

15 Truly multilingual - Hindi

16 Truly multilingual - Punjabi

17 Truly multilingual - Urdu

18 Xaira FAQs Is Xaira free and where can I get it? Yes, it is absolutely free. You can get a copy (binary for Windows, and source codes for compilation on the Unix/Linux/Mac system) at the SourceForce website. The latest release is Where can I get more documentation? In addition to the built-in help file, more documentation is available at the Xaira site: Where can I get technical help? You can sign up for the Xaira Preview List to get help: For a critical review, see pdf pdf