[Corpora-List] Software release: BNCweb (CQP-edition)

[Sebastian Hoffmann]

We are happy to announce the official release of BNCweb Version 4 
(CQP-edition).

What is BNCweb?

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.

Main advantages of BNCweb:

- It is very user-friendly.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- It is absolutely free (its components are released under the GNU 
Public License).

For an overview of the functionality of BNCweb, the actual BNCweb 
scripts,  information about how to install BNCweb on your own server, 
please consult http://www.bncweb.info.

This page also provides a link to a list of errors and 
inconsistencies 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.

A detailed, textbook-style manual for BNCweb (with exercises for 
self-study) is currently in preparation and will become available in 
2008.

Sebastian Hoffmann & Stefan Evert
e-mail: bncweb at mac.com
-- 

Dr. Sebastian Hoffmann
Department of Linguistics and English Language
Bowland College
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YT
U.K.
phone: +44 (0)1524 592254
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