[CWB] Does CQPweb support dynamic attributes now?

[Stefan Evert]

> Well, for illustration of "not really executed",  let's take the query [pos="N.*" & f(word)>100] on the Brown corpus for example, which returns 90,211 matches. In comparison, resetting 100 to 1000 in the previous query returns 7,205 matches (all experimented with BFSU CQPweb). This fact shows that the f() function does work. However,  further "Frequency breakdown"  reveals that even words with a single occurrence are in the final result set, an evidence that the f() function is not really respected (at least in some operations within CQPweb). 

Those are probably word forms that occur more than 100 times in the corpus, but aren't always tagged as nouns.  When I try your query on the brown family, I find words like

	perfect
	unemployed

at the end of the frequency ranking, which are infrequently used as nouns.

> I find the dynamic attribute an attractive idea as it would enable CQPweb administrators to  extend the CQP query language to suit their particular needs, for instance, using WordNet for some semantic restrictions. There must be some good reasons for removing it from the source but is it possible to have it back?

The way dynamic attributes were implemented made them so slow as to be practically useless.

Alternative implementations are more complicated and can easily create security holes – we haven't seen enough demand for dynamic attributes to justify their re-introduction.

For example, if you want to use semantic restrictions based on WordNet in your queries, why not just annotated WordNet synonyms or whatever synset information you need as a regular p-attribute?

Best,
Stefan