Compiling a corpus with Corpus Presenter
If you or your associates are involved in compiling a corpus then you may well find that the programs of the Corpus Presenter suite can help you. The main task when compiling a corpus is collecting and editing texts. This can be done with the supplied text editor Corpus Presenter Text Tool. It is a powerful ASCII and RTF editor and can handle files of virtually any size easily. It contains many macro options to speed up the task of entering and editing data. It allows you to structure a text and have this reflected in a hierarchical tree. It has an outline facility and allows the collation of texts. But most of all the text editor can cater elegantly for the tagging of texts. If you wish to partially or wholly tag texts of your corpus then software which will largely automatise this task is of the essence. The text editor allows you to tag in an automatic or a manual mode or a combination of both. List of tags can be maintained and used at will with different texts.
Why use Corpus Presenter for your corpus?
The main program Corpus Presenter is useful when compiling a corpus because you can use it without altering the corpus files in any way. Hence a decision about what software is to be used finally with your corpus need not be taken in advance as opposed to software which requires complex indexing before using a corpus.
The structural presentation of a corpus can be easily specified with the utility Corpus Presenter Create Dataset which allows you to design the controlling data set file interactively. Furthermore, a data set file can be edited later permitting a re-organisation of the corpus presentation – without affecting your text files – should this be desired or deemed necessary.
Two types of tagging are possible with the supplied text editor Corpus Presenter Text Tool.
Both tagging options are to be found in the Tools menu of the program. Before starting tagging it is strongly advisable to consider what texts you wish to tag in what manner. The procedures available here are mechanical aids. They do not make any decisions on the contents of text. Successful tagging is only possible if the user designs a sensible tagging system and the words in the texts to be tagged are unambiguous. Think first of all what your goal in tagging is. It is a time-consuming procedure, but greatly accelerated by functions such as the present two. Nonetheless, tagging is as good as you make it. Whether it yields the results you want depends on how you go about it.
1) Automatic tagging
This is the easiest form of tagging and will work best when the forms to be tagged in a text are unambiguous. For instance, if you assign a tag _INTERROG_ADV to a form like which then the results are liable to be incorrect if your text(s) contains a sentence like The car which was stolen where which is a relative pronoun. So be careful with automatic tagging if there are polyfunctional forms in your text(s).
Before automatic tagging you must write (or adapt) a list file in which the tags and the forms (words or parts of words) which are to be assigned these tags are specified. Please consult the supplied file Tagging_Automatic_Test.lst to see how this is done. When the Automatic Tagging window opens, you can select a list of tags (you can have several on disk if you wish). You must select the rows in the table with tags and you must choose forms before tagging (or deselect "Only tag subset of forms"). You then select tags in the grid which appears in the usual way, by pressing either the Shift-key or the Ctrl-key along any of the arrow keys, just as in any Windows program. You may also specify if tags are only to be attached to whole words and you can choose to confirm each tag, if you wish. The latter is useful if you want to skip forms to which a tag does not apply. You can also specify whether tags are to be highlighted (by red marking). This is only retained if you stored the tagged file(s) to disk as an RTF file(s).
2) Interactive tagging
Tagging a text consists of attaching a grammatical label as a suffix to a word form. This is an important aspect of preparing text corpora for later linguistic retrieval tasks, either by the compiler(s) or others who have access to these corpora. However, tagging texts is time-consuming and its accuracy depends on the nature of the texts and the tagging scheme used.
With the option Interactive tagging the user decides what category of label is to be suffixed to what word forms. Once this operation has been carried out grammatical information can be retrieved from the texts of a corpus by referencing the tags suffixed onto words which have been tagged. In general you cannot reference semantic information in a corpus, i.e. a tagged corpus is primarily intended for retrieving morphological and possibly syntactic information.
To tag words/forms in a loaded text, you first load a set of words/forms to fill the list Words to tag. You then get a list for Tags to use. Now select some words/forms (in the Words to tag list) which are to be assigned to one of the tags. The words/forms are entered in the sub-list on the left by clicking on the button Import checked forms. Choose a tag to be attached to each of these forms. This appears in the top-left corner. Start the tagging process by clicking on Start.
The maximum number of tags and of input forms is 512 items in each case. The lists can be created with Corpus Presenter Text Tool itself and stored to disk for later use on this level of the program. Take a look at the small file Tagging_Interactive_Test_(Tags).lst which can be used for tags. Try the file Tagging_Interactive_Test_(Word_Forms).lst for a set of words/forms to be tagged. Use the file Chaucer_Prologue.rtf as a text with words/forms to be tagged. The files just mentioned can be downloaded by clicking on the following link. You can now experiment to see how the tagging actually works.
Tagging parameters
Tagging texts
1) Automatic tagging
Shift-Ctrl-F3
Screen shots
2) Interactive tagging
F3
Screen shots
Download test files for tagging (and normalisation) (size: 18 KB)
1) Words or strings
Specifies if only words – or any string – can be tagged.
2) Case-sensitive search
Determines whether small and capital letters are distinguished.
3) Automatic or manual
Here you can decide whether Corpus Presenter Text Tool halts at each find and asks the user to confirm whether a form is to be tagged. Note that with manual tagging you can also edit the finds in the current text as you proceed.
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