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--></style><title>Software release: BNCweb
(CQP-edition)</title></head><body>
<div>We are happy to announce the official release of BNCweb Version 4
(CQP-edition).</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>What is BNCweb?</b></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>BNCweb is a web-based client program for searching and retrieving
lexical, grammatical and textual data from the British National Corpus
(BNC). It relies on the Corpus Query Processor (CQP) of the IMS Open
Corpus Workbench to provide a convenient interface between the user
and the rich variety of annotated text in the 100-million word BNC in
its most recent incarnation, the XML-version.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>Main advantages of BNCweb:</b></div>
<div><b><br></b></div>
<div>- It is very user-friendly.</div>
<div>- It is a web-based application - end users do not need to
install any extra software on their computers. Any web-browser (on any
platform) will do.</div>
<div>- It is fast! Have you ever wanted to calculate collocations for
the noun lemma TIME? A collocation analysis of its 180,243 instances
in the BNC takes just under 30 seconds on a version of BNCweb which is
installed on an entry-level Apple MacBook.</div>
<div>- It is powerful and flexible: In addition to basic queries
(available via an intuitive query syntax), the interface allows more
complex searches using full-fledged CQP-syntax.</div>
<div>- It is optimized for use by larger groups of users: a cache
system minimizes CPU-load and disk space usage when different users
perform the same queries.</div>
<div>- It is absolutely free (its components are released under the
GNU Public License).</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>For an<b> overview of the functionality</b> of BNCweb, the actual
BNCweb scripts, information about how to install BNCweb on your
own server, please consult http://www.bncweb.info.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>This page also provides a link to a<b> list of errors and
inconsistencies</b> that were detected while we were updating BNCweb
to make it compatible with the new XML-version of the corpus. The bulk
of these issues affect the spoken component of the BNC.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>A detailed, textbook-style manual for BNCweb (with exercises for
self-study) is currently in preparation and will become available in
2008.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Sebastian Hoffmann & Stefan Evert</div>
<div>e-mail: bncweb@mac.com</div>
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<div><br>
Dr. Sebastian Hoffmann<br>
Department of Linguistics and English Language<br>
Bowland College<br>
Lancaster University<br>
Lancaster LA1 4YT<br>
U.K.<br>
phone: +44 (0)1524 592254</div>
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