1. XAIRA is an XML Aware Indexing and Retrieval Architecture ● Developed from the British National Corpus Sara program, it provides: – platform-independent XML indexer and server components – a toolkit and query interface for Windows ● All server functions and structures are defined by the Xaira Object Model: an open API for language corpus work ● Developed with funding from the Andrew W Mellon foundation, xaira is an open source system released under the GPL ➔ http://xaira.sf.org

2. Yes, but what does it do? ● Xaira facilitates linguistic exploration of corpora with or without XML markup. ● Specifically, it produces – word lists and lexica – KWIC concordances – collocation and colligation lists – distribution patterns ● Intelligent search and retrieval, based on markup and marked-up structures

3. A word query ● Enter a stem or pattern ● See forms and frequencies ● See selected variants ● Look up hits ● Save wordlists

4. A Keyword in Context concordance

5. A collocation list ● After any query... ● See word forms that collocate with it ● Adjust window, filter by frequency, select score ● Look up collocates ● Save wordlists

6. adverbial pretty vs. rather

7. Let's get started! (1) Start the xaira-tools program (2) Select Index Wizard from File menu (3) Name your corpus (4) Find some plain text files (5) Index them (6) Look at the results with Xaira client

8. What did we just do? Texts filelist.xml bib.xml corpus_header.xml corpus_parameters.xml corpus wizard Index indexer