Wu, Canzhong & Christian Matthiessen
Macquarie University, Sydney

Canzhong Wu
School of English, Linguistics & Media
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW 2109
Australia
Tel: 61-2-98508764
Fax: 61-2-98508240
e-mail: cwu@pip.elm.mq.edu.au

Strand: computational

Title: Making A Linguist's Life Easier

If we want to obtain relevant information about linguistic patterns from texts, we first have to analyse these texts lexicogrammatically -- grammatically in terms of the systemic choices and functional structures of clause complexes, clauses, groups, phrases, etc. and lexically in terms of collocational patterns. This, however, is often done manually, and takes most of our precious time. To facilitate the analysis, we have started to develop tools that will automate or semi-automate this process, and now this target has partially achieved by our several computational tools. These tools are intended to complement existing computational facilities for systemic analysis (e.g. Michael O'Donnell's WAG system and Jonathan Webster's Functional Grammar Processor) and to support both general linguistic description and also various applications.

At this conference, we'd like to demonstrate 1) 'Text Analyser', a tool for lexicogrammatical text analysis, allows the user to analyse texts easily by clicking buttons, and making choices from menus or from networks. The Analyser will put the result into its database, which can then be searched according to features of the analysis (such as 'material: doing & effective' or 'verbal: verbalization: as locution', etc.) or particular lexical items. 2) 'Concordance' allows the user to search for specific lexical items, collocational patterns and semantic types set by the user. Meanwhile, this tool will show the user the frequency of specific items or collocational patterns in a very intuitive way. These two tools have proved to be very effective and help considerably in our own research.