A Web-based Advanced and User Friendly System: The Oslo Corpus of Tagged Norwegian Texts

Abstract

A general purpose text corpus meant for linguists and lexicographers needs to satify quality criteria at at least four different levels. The first two criteria are fairly well established; the corpus should have a wide variety of texts and be tagged according to a fine-grained system. The last two criteria are much less widely appreciated, unfortunately. One has to do with variety of search criteria: the user should be allowed to search for any information contained in the corpus, and with any combination possible. In addition, the search results should be presented in a choice of ways. The fourth criterion has to do with accessability. It is a rather surprising fact that while user interfaces tend to be simple and self explanatory in most areas of life represented electronically, corpus interfaces are still extremely user unfriendly. In this paper, we present a corpus whose interface we have given a lot of thought, and likewise the possible search options, viz. the Oslo Corpus of Tagged Norwegian Texts.

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