Creating Research Environments with BlackLab
Ubiquity Press eBooks · 2017
The BlackLab search engine for linguistically annotated corpora is a recurring element in several CLARIN and other recent search and retrieval projects. Besides the core search library, we have developed the BlackLab Server REST web service which makes it easy for computational linguists and programmers to write anything from quick analysis scripts to full-fledged search interfaces, and the AutoSearch application which allows nontechnical linguistic researchers to index and search their own data.This paper describes the motivation for developing the BlackLab platform, how it has been used in actual research, and sketches future developments which will make it a more powerful tool for the creation of research environments.