Search

A lot of work has been done by CLARIN-LC to ll CLARIN with data and applications to support syntactic research. For this reason, a separate part of this book is dedicated to this topic. The chapters in this part only partially cover the work done in CLARIN-LC to support syntactic research. I will rst briey describe the work done that is not covered by the chapters in this part (section 17.2), and then introduce the chapters (section 17.3).

Scientic research within the humanities is dierent from what it was a few decades ago. For instance, new sources of information, such as digital grammars, lexical databases and large corpora of real-language data oer new opportunities for linguistics. The Taalportaal grammatical database, with its links to other linguistic resources via the CLARIN infrastructure, is a prime example of a new type of tool for linguistic research. 2

In this chapter I will describe what the CLARIN infrastructure is and how it can be used, with a focus on the Low Countries (and especially the Netherlands) part of the CLARIN infrastructure. I aim to explain how a Humanities researcher can use the CLARIN infrastructure. I describe the basic functionality that CLARIN aims to offer, including searching for data and software, applying software to data, and storing data and software resulting from research.

Given its origins in linguistics and language technology, it should come as no surprise that CLARIN-LC created many infrastructural facilities for linguistics. These will be discussed in this part of the book, with the exception of infrastructural facilities for syntax, to which a separate part of this book is dedicated (Part III). The chapters in this part only partially cover the work done in CLARIN-LC to support linguistic research. I will rst provide a brief overall overview of the relevant data and soware that resulted from CLARIN-LC (section 9.2), and then summarise the topics of the chapters of this part (section 9.3).

Though CLARIN originated in the linguistics and computational linguistics communities, CLARIN-LC (in particular CLARIN-NL) covers a lot of other Humanities disciplines. This is in part due to the bottom-up approach for subprojects for data curation and soware demonstrators, and in part to the active policy to include these other disciplines, implemented with an interactive user survey and active ‘evangelising’ among researchers of all Humanities disciplines. We will rst provide a brief overall overview of the relevant data and soware that resulted from CLARIN-LC (section 25.2), and then summarise the topics of the chapters of this part (section 25.3).

In this chapter we describe the web application PaQu (Parse and Query), and carry out a small case study to illustrate its use. PaQu is an application for searching in Dutch treebanks and for analysing the search results. One can search in the LASSY and CGN treebanks, or upload one’s own Dutch corpus, which is then parsed and made available for search and analysis. PaQu offers, next to an interface to formulate Xpath queries, a dedicated interface for searching for dependency triples. This makes it easy to search in treebanks for grammatical dependencies, which would otherwise require very complex queries. It offers extensive functionality for analysing the search results. The dedicated search interface makes PaQu a prime example of the kind of applications that CLARIN promotes. The case study provides an analysis of the syntactic selectional differences between two near-synonymous verbs.