Using XAIRA to explore your XML Corpus

This three hour workshop introduces the basic concepts of the XAIRA corpus analysis tool.

Included with the recently published new edition of the British National Corpus (the BNC XML edition) was a new version of the XAIRA corpus search engine. In this workshop, we will introduce the features of this software to participants interested in using it for their own corpora. Xaira has been developed as a general purpose open source cross-platform software architecture, for use with corpora in any language, with corpora that have no markup at all, or corpora with very rich and complex XML markup. Our tutorial will demonstrate this by indexing three different versions of the same corpus: one in plain text, one with simple structural XML markup, and one with full linguistic annotation.

We will introduce the various searching capabilities provided by the software and show to what extent the level of corpus markup determines their usability. Xaira provides concordances, word lists, and collocation lists like other corpus tools; unlike others, it comines these with complex XML-aware structural queries. We will focus on the opportunities and challenges such features provide for the language teaching environment. Particular attention will be paid to issues of integration and portability, in order to show how results obtained with Xaira can be integrated into other teaching material. We will also present and discuss strategies for encouraging students' own exploration of corpus resources using the program.

All material used at the workshop will be made available online at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/workshop/Lisbon/. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own materials for experimentation.