Getting started

When you use XKWIC you will see a window as in Figure 4.4.1.

  

Figure 4.1: XKWIC window

This window is the result of asking for a concordance of all words starting with ``research'' in the Penn Treebank.

The XKWIC window consists of the following parts:

Menu bar.

With menus called File, Concordance, Query History, Subcorpora and Windows

Query input.

The window in which you type your queries. In this case, the query was [word="research.*"], which means we were looking for all occurrences of the word ``research'', ``researcher'', ``researching'', ``research-led'', etc.

Search space.

The window in which you specify in which corpus the search should be carried out. In this case it is UP, which is the Penn Treebank. Clicking the question mark button will list all available corpora.

Start query.

Clicking this button will launch your query.

KWIC list.

The search results are displayed in this window. The string that matches the search query (also called the ``match interval'') is printed in bold and enclosed in angle brackets Near the top right hand corner of this window you will also see how many matches were found for the query (in this case 635 matches).

Context.

When you click on a sentence in the KWIC list window, the sentence is highlighted in the KWIC list and is repeated in the Context window with some more context to the left and right of the match interval.

Status line.

Displays warnings and other messages. In this case it just says that it's ``Done'' executing the query.

Try to execute this query yourself. First, select a corpus. Clicking on the Question Mark button will give you a list of corpora to choose from:

BNC

The British National Corpus.

DK

FR

Susanne

The Susanne Corpus.

UP

The Penn Treebank (from the University of Pennsylvania).

Choose the Penn Treebank.

To find all occurrences of the word ``research'' you just type the query [word="research"] and click on the button Start Query. If you want to find words that start with ``research'', type [word="research.*"] in the query window.

The results of the query should now be displayed in the KWIC list window. The string that matches the query (the ``match interval'') is enclosed in angle brackets, and a few words of context to the left and right are given.

If you want to see more of the words surrounding the match interval, just click anywhere on the sentence and you will see more of the context in the CONTEXT window.