Niklas Deworetzki
Software, Science & More!
Syntactic Sugar for Syntactic Queries: Sequential Representations for Dependency Queries
Abstract
Syntactic query languages such as Grew and dep_search allow looking for grammatical patterns in linguistically annotated corpora. However, these languages are often unsupported by large-scale corpus management tools, where queries are of an essentially sequential nature. In this paper, we present CQP/Tree, a tool to convert syntactic queries into CQL, the Corpus Query Language used in Corpus Workbench, SketchEngine, Korp and several other such systems. In this framework, syntactic queries act as syntactic sugar: they allow expressing complex CQL queries in a more readable and concise fashion, thus bridging the gap between expressive linguistic search and large-scale corpora. CQP/Tree is available as a web and command-line tool, as well as an open source Python library.