Poliqarp 1.0 review

Poliqarp is a utility for searching large corpora. Here are some key features of "Poliqarp": Support for tagged corpora · The

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Daniel Janus

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Poliqarp is a utility for searching large corpora.

Here are some key features of "Poliqarp":
Support for tagged corpora

The searched collection can contain not only raw text, but also information about the words and texts that constitute it (grammatical forms of words; structure of the texts; various meta-information about the texts such as authorship and date of writing).

Expressive query language

Poliqarp's query language is based on regular expressions and allows you to search not only for a given word or sequences of words, but also, for example, for:
an adjective followed by a noun
five nouns in a row
five, six, or seven nouns in a row
a given word occurring close, but not necessarily next, to another given word
words starting with 'z' that occur in texts published in the 19th century
sentences longer than 100 words
...and many more

Support for positional tagsets

The tags assigned to words can have an internal structure, and this structure may be incorporated in queries. For instance, nouns might have gender, number or case, verbs might have aspect, and so on.
This is especially useful with languages that are rich in inflection, such as Polish (in fact, Poliqarp was originally developed and is used within a Polish corpus project — the IPI PAN Corpus).
Does not depend on a particular tagset
Support for Unicode
You can create corpora of texts written in almost any language in its native script — be it English, Polish, Japanese or Thai — as long as they are encoded in the UTF-8 format.

Support for ambiguities

Tags of a word are not necessarily unique: there might occur situations where a word can be interpreted in several ways (and thus have several tags assigned to it). Poliqarp can handle such situations and allows you to say whether your query must match any of the possible interpretations or all of them. Few, if any, other concordancers have this ability.

Multi-platform

Poliqarp is written in Java and portable C, and is thus available for Windows and most Unix-like systems, including Linux, *BSD and Solaris. Currently, it supports only little-endian architectures, but work is underway to make it endian-neutral.

Efficient

It is hard to estimate the average time of searching a corpus, since it heavily depends on the structure of the query. However, simple queries (for a word or phrase) take a few seconds even on corpora containing more than a hundred million words (in terms of raw texts, that's several gigabytes including tags and metadata!) More complex query take longer to execute, but even then, you get the results as soon as they are found, so you don't have to wait long.

Free

Poliqarp is free/open source software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Requirements:
Java 1.5