[CWB] CQPweb 3.3.18 rev. 1883: Set collocation window from and collocation window to to ten tokens

[Hardie, Andrew]

Hi Jorn,

The important point to understand is the difference between the span and the maximum span.

The span = what it's currently set to

The max span = the span used when the collocation data is collected. You can opt to use a smaller span than the max (in which case the collected data for the more distant positions will be ignored for the time being) but you can't opt to use a bigger span than the max (because that requires data that wasn't collected).

The max span is set in the "Choose settings for proximity-based collocations" window IE when you go from the concordance to the collocations tool for the first time. The max span can't be changed within the coll tool screen. You would have to go back to the concordance screen and select collocations from the menu again.

The user's preferred default span is what the main coll screen is set to when the user arrives - IF that span is available in the compiled data. If not, it will be as big as possible.

So if your user prefs are set to L10 R10, then the initial span will be L10 R10 *as long as* you set the maximum span to 10 or more.

Otherwise, it will be whatever the max span was.

I hope that makes sense (it always seemed straightforward to me until I typed this message to explain it, and now it seems awfully and unnecessarily confusing).

The TLDR is that your users should set the max span to L10 R10 in order to get the flexibility to use large spans once they are on the collocations screen.

Incidentally, this UI was inherited from BNCweb, which was designed with hardware limitations of 20+ years ago in mind. (Thus the need to set the collocation data just once when entering the collocation screen; thus the avoidance of compiling data for attributes/spans that weren't needed, in order to keep things fast.)

On today's systems it is probably safe to recalculate the data between displays of the collocation screen if necessary. That would allow all the options to be moved into the Collocations screen, without the separate little popup. (I'd probably then segment the Collocation controls into "Basic" - the span and stats - and "Detailed" - minima, p-attribute, etc, only appearing when invoked.)

This would be a lot of reprogramming to do, and it wouldn't actually add any functionality, so it won't be anywhere near top of my list unless there is an outcry from the members of this mailing list at large!

(hint hint, everyone, now would be the time to add your 2p)

best

Andrew.





-----Original Message-----
From: cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it <cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it> On Behalf Of Jörn Stegmeier
Sent: 29 November 2024 17:45
To: cwb at sslmit.unibo.it
Subject: [CWB] CQPweb 3.3.18 rev. 1883: Set collocation window from and collocation window to to ten tokens

Dear list,

I am a little stumped. Some of our users told me that they are having
problems to set the collocations windows in the "Collocations controls"
section which is displayed by [url]/collocation.php to anything higher
than "5 to the Left" / "5 to the Right". We are pretty sure that we used
10 to the left and 10 to the right in earlier versions of CQPweb.

As far as I can tell, there are three locations where one can modify the
window span for collocations.

There are the settings in the user account ("Your user account details"
-> settings -> "Collocations options") where the default span for
calculating collocations can be set to "From 10 to the Left to 10 to the
Right". Even if this is the case it doesn't change the options in the
"Collocations controls".

The second location pops up after choosing "Collocations" from the
"Choose action ..." menu in the concordance window. This is a smaller
window titled "Choose settings for proximity-based collocations".
Besides the possibility to choose which p-attributes to include it also
offers to set the "Maximum window span"  by choosing a value between 4
and 10.

After clicking on "View collocations" the collocation view offers the
third location, namely the "Collocations controls" section mentioned
above. There, the options seem to be always limited to +/- 5 to the Left
and +/- 5 to the Right for both the "Collocation window from" and the
"Collocation window to".

Hoping the solution isn't embarrassingly obvious, any hints would be
welcome as to what I should do to enable our users to choose the window
spans more freely.

Best

Jörn


--
Dr. Jörn Stegmeier
DFG-Projekt "Kontroverse Diskurse"
Teilprojekt 7 "Methodologie & Reflexion"

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