[CWB] What's possible via the CQPweb interface

[Josep M. Fontana]

Thanks Andrew. This clarifies things quite a bit. I had totally 
forgotten about the security considerations. I think this came up a 
while ago when somebody (perhaps myself) asked about some other 
functionality of CQPWeb. At any rate, I will check the available videos 
to become a bit more familiar with the additional functionalities of 
CQPWeb. Also, I checked in our library and it turns out we have quite a 
few copies of the book so I will be able to obtain all the information I 
need.

I have a little doubt about one of the things you said, though. You 
should obviously know better than me but I haven't been able to do what 
I said I had tried to do via the frequency breakdown tool. What I get 
with the frequency breakdown tool is the frequencies of instantiations 
of the whole search string. So if the search string is 'lemma X POS Y', 
the frequency breakdown yields the frequency of different instantiations 
of this whole string as specific combinations of tokens (frequency 
breakdown of words only) or the frequency of the specific combination of 
tags (frequency breakdown of annotation only) or the frequency for 
specific combinations of both.

What I was trying to obtain was the frequency of lemmas that are 
instantiations of 'POS Y' in a search string of the form 'lemma X POS 
Y'. In the command line I would have used:

$ count Last by lemma %cd on matchend;

This, as far as I can tell and without having read the relevant sections 
in the book (I have not checked it out from the library yet), appears 
not to be possible via the CQPWeb interface. I have a couple of grad 
students who needed to work with one of our corpora and I thought that 
for the kinds of things they needed to do at this point the CQPWeb would 
more than suffice. This kind of information about frequencies, however, 
is useful for them so I guess I will have to convince them that the 
command line will not eat them alive when they are distracted and that 
it didn't harm any of the other students that used it before them.

Thanks again guys for the tool and for the help.

JM
>
> The limit is as follows: you can only run queries. All other CQP 
> operations are locked out (intentionally, it's for security - note 
> that CQP unrestricted allows you to muck up your filesystem if you 
> want!) and must be accessed indirectly via the GUI tools of CQPweb.
>
> The particular case you mention is covered by the frequency breakdown 
> tool, I think (from the concordance screen).
>
> >>Is there any good user guide or reference manual in written form?
>
> There is a book: Corpus linguistics with BNCweb. (Don't be put off by 
> the fact it is on BNCweb, 90% of it is about the things they have in 
> common.)
>
> Otherwise: no, there is no written documentation, nor will there ever 
> be unless someone other than me writes it. This is for 3 reasons: most 
> users prefer the videos, making the videos is drastically quicker than 
> writing a comprehensive set of docs would be, and I definitely do not 
> have time to do both.
>
> The exception is the admin side, of course -- due to how technical 
> that side of the Content is. The sysadmin manual is incomplete, but 
> reasonably comprehensive within the chapters that have been written to 
> date.
>
> Best
>
> Andrew.
>
> On 25 Apr 2015 8:48 pm, "Josep M. Fontana" <josepm.fontana at upf.edu> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     If the answer to this question is to be found in some specific
>     section
>     of some manual or documentation, please point me to it but I haven't
>     been able to find it consulting the documentation that is
>     available to me.
>
>     The question is simple. What are the exact limitations of the CQPWeb
>     interface to use the full cqp syntax? In general I always
>     recommend the
>     CQPWeb interface to most of my undergraduate and to the new grad
>     students because I find many are intimidated by the terminal (I
>     work in
>     the context of the humanities and except for very old people who
>     still
>     remember DOS, few people have experience using the command line in a
>     terminal window).
>
>     This generally works well but every once in a while when I'm
>     trying to
>     show them something I need to use the full CQP syntax because this is
>     what I am most familiar with and I can remember better. Most regular
>     searches are OK but the other day, for instance, I tried to get the
>     frequencies of the particular lemmas appearing in the last
>     position of a
>     particular search involving only reference to POS and I got an error
>     message. Unless I did something wrong (although I checked and it
>     worked
>     with the terminal), this doesn't seem to be possible in the web
>     interface.
>
>     I tried to use the 'frequency' option in the CQPWeb interface but I
>     realized I didn't know how to use it properly. I know there are some
>     wonderful videos but at that time I needed some written
>     documentation to
>     find information about what I needed to do and I wasn't able to
>     find it.
>     Is there any good user guide or reference manual in written form?
>
>     I totally understand that the goal of CQPWeb is not to replicate the
>     functionality of the command line and that by definition there are
>     going
>     to be some restrictions in what you can do. But is there any
>     documentation where all of this is made explicit? I have access to
>     the
>     paper Andrew wrote and to some some tutorials people have created
>     but is
>     there any other more complete manual out there with more detailed
>     information about what is possible and what isn't?
>
>     Thanks a lot in advance and my apologies if I have ignored something
>     that should be really obvious.
>
>     JM
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