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The BNC is a corpus - a collection of texts - and can be used with different kinds of search tools. SARA/Xaira is such a tool. What makes SARA/Xaira different from many other corpus tools is that it allows you to search the corpus not only for words and phrases but also for other kinds of information, such as the information about the corpus texts included in the header. By using SARA/Xaira with the BNC you can easily restrict your search to texts of a particular category, such as spoken data, material found in books only, or texts from a certain domain.
SARA (SGML Aware Retrieval Application) was developed specifically for access to the BNC in a Microsoft Windows environment. It is freely available to all BNC licensees and also for registered users of the BNC Subscription service hosted by the British Library. A copy of SARA is delivered with every copy of the BNC World corpus. You can also download the latest version here. The SARA webpage offers more information about SARA.
The Xaira program derives from SARA but has been developed further. It can be used on all well-formed corpora in XML. The BNC XML Edition, BNC Baby, and BNC Sampler corpora are delivered with a copy of Xaira. You can also download the latest version of XAIRA from SourceForge.net. More information about Xaira can be found on the Xaira webpage.
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