PowerConc: An R-gram Based Corpus Analysis Tool

Jiajin Xu & Yunlong JiaBeijing Foreign Studies University

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PowerConc• National Research Centre for Foreign Language E

ducation, Beijing Foreign Studies University• A general purpose tool for corpus analysis• Developed in Delphi• can deal with any ANSI encoded texts

– E.g. on a Simplified Chinese OS– works well with Simplified/Trad. Chinese texts,

(un)tokenised or raw/POS-tagged, as well as raw/POS-tagged English texts

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• Size: 1.5MB, compressed package less than 1MB

• Installation: Doesn’t require any installation.

• OS: Works only on Windows now.

PowerConc

Design principles for PowerConc

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Ideally• Most powerful, can do anything that a concor

dancer can do and cannot do.• involves least effort in learning to use it

• Doing MORE with less• Reductionism in software design

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Less buttons and/or tabs

Frequencycount

SearchList

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Freq. Count

Concordance N-gram list

Collocation &Colligation Key n-gram list

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More possibilities in tool develop’t

• Corpus-informed/related ‘grammars’– Pattern grammar (local grammar)– Collostruction– Lexical grammar (natural grammar, real grammar)– Lexical priming (textual colligation)– Longman grammar: Biber et al. grammar register

variation• Tool development lags behind

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From phraseology to R-gram

• Many of the ‘grammars’ as some sort of phraseology

• We coined a technical term ‘R-gram’.– An operational parallel to phraseology– The unit of language can be words, lemmata,

phrases, POS, POS sequence, and combination of all these.

– Can be linguistic structures with uncertain words or categories (e.g. be passive/get passive).

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• a * of: collocational framework• It be ADJ that: evaluative construction• Noun noun compounds• Bi-nominal constructions• Passive constructions: be/get ADV. V-EN• All these could be matched with Regular

Expressions.• But Regex is too difficult for lay users.

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Easy search with enhanced hits

• Smart Input• Three meta-characters in Smart Input syntax,

the simplest grammar ever.

• @be returns all inflectional forms of ‘be’

• #n returns all nouns

• * refers to any single word

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• a * of => a * of• It be ADJ that => It @be #adj that• Noun noun compound => #n #n• Bi-nominal => #n and #n• Passive => \S+_VB\S+\s(\S+_[RXPJDN]\S+\s)*\

S+_V\S*N

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Limitation

• speed• A concordancer without applying indexing• can't process texts larger than a few million

words anyway.

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Download PowerConc

•www.fleric.org.cn/powerconc/• http://www.bfsu-corpus.org/channels/tools

Thank you!