<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Dear Sirs,</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">First of all, I'm very sorry if this
kind of text is not to put in this forum…</span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I belong to the Linguistics Center
of the University of Lisbon (CLUL) which is a department of interdisciplinary
research, training and scientific promotion, integrated in the University of Lisbon, in direct dependence of the
Faculdade de Letras.</span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I will briefly
describe the corpora that we have compiled and the queries that we want to be
able to run, asking you a big favour: can you tell me, with your long
experience, which is the best database and interface that demands our needs?</span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Our corpus is around 350M
words (2,5 M spoken) and consists of a monitor corpus (in the sense of John
Sinclair). We collect all the materials that we find available into this corpus
without aiming for balance and representativeness. Based on this monitor
corpus, we have designed some smaller corpora that are variety or genre
specific and a 50M words balanced corpus. A subpart of our corpus (1M) has been
automatically tagged (POS) and revised. You do not have a syntactically or
semantically annotated corpus for the moment, but it could be a development of
the already existing tagged corpus.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Does the database query engine requires the indexation of the corpus?</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">If so, is there any requirement on the files format?</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Our corpus is being compiled since the 70s, so the files are in very
different formats (from txt, doc, to html, and others) and we need to assure
that any corpus management and query software can process different file
formats. We also want to assure a software that accommodates a large amount of
files, without requiring to put all the files together in a single one. We
would also need to know if the system requires the data to be tokenized and, if
so, if it incorporates this facility.</span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">We have been using software
designed at our research center, but the program is lacking important
functionalities and also a user-friendly quality interface, and this leads us
to seek other options of corpus management and exploitation. We want a program
which can be used either internally for our research staff so as to manage and
search the corpus, as well as externally to give access to the corpus through
our webpage.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">The corpus users (either
internally or externally via the web) must first have the possibility to design
the subcorpus over which they want to run the search based on several fields
like written, spoken, tagged, newspaper, fiction, and even more specific
searches like an author or all authors that were born in the XIX century. A 50M
words balanced corpus will also be available if the user wishes to use a
pre-designed corpus.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">After designing or
selecting the corpus, the user will define the search. Besides the usual
queries (frequencies and concordances of words, part of words, regular
expressions…, sort…), we would like to know if the system would allow for
queries on POS tags (we have different tagsets for different corpora). Another
question regards lemmatisation: would it be possible to integrate our
lemmatiser in the system in order to search for lemmas (based on our
lemmas/word forms database)?</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">We have done some work on
collocations for Portuguese based on a 50M word corpus and we would find
interesting to be able to integrate this search into the possible queries. Our
software extracts n-grams from the corpus and sorts the results according to
the Mutual Information values. Would it be possible?</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">In what concerns the
response times, we believe it would be strongly dependent on the corpus
designed by the user. For external queries, we will have to limit the corpus
size to be queried since 350M words would probably crash any query attempt on
the internet (we have an indexed 11M words corpus available for online queries
right now and it does fine as long as no sorting and no lemma query is asked
for). For internal queries that may be complex, no time limit is to be
established, but for online queries, 10 seconds is probably a good time.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I hope this gives you a precise
idea of our objectives and on the possibility of using any possible system for
this purpose. If you have some doubts about something, please contact me so I
can explain better our concerns.</span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Best regards,</span></p>
<p><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Pedro Sa</span></p>