Query a corpus in near-natural language
Jiří Milička, Denisa Šebestová · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2024
Abstract This paper addresses the pressing issue of accessibility of corpora to users who are not able or willing to learn a formal query language. It introduces a working online automatic translator from a near-natural language into the Corpus Query Language (CQL), as used in SketchEngine , Czech National Corpus web applications, and other services. The translator does not require strict syntactical patterns and allows for a certain amount of typing errors, using the redundancy associated with natural language. It allows querying corpora of 35 languages hosted by the Czech National Corpus infrastructure, all of them annotated in the Universal Dependencies formalism. Alternatively, the translated CQL code can be employed in other compatible systems. The paper both presents the theoretical assumptions of our solution and outlines the details of its implementation, including examples of use.