[bnc] BNC and Xaira

Using BNC with Xaira

This page contains introductory information about XAIRA. Information on how to obtain and install the software and step-by-step instructions on how to use the programs with BNC corpora can be found by following the links below.

Quick-links

Installing BNC XML Edition and Xaira
Using Xaira with BNC XML Edition: Sample searches introducing Xaira and BNC XML Edition
Using BNC XML for English language study: examples of how to use the corpus and Xaira
BNC-Baby with Xaira: Examples of how to use Xaira for specific tasks.
Xaira Reference Guide
Xaira webpage
Common Problems section (under revision)

Introduction

The BNC is a corpus - a collection of texts - not a software tool. You can use many different software tools to process the BNC, for example to search through it for particular words or expression, to display parts of it, or to analyse specific linguistic features they contain. We provide a general purpose tool (called XAIRA) which performs many of these functions, but you are free to use whatever software tools you like with the BNC.

XAIRA (XML Aware Indexing and Retrieval Architecture) is a general purpose XML search engine developed specifically for access to the BNC and similar language corpora. XAIRA can be used with any well-formed XML corpus, but takes full advantage of the detailed XML markup in the BNC. It is provided free of charge along with the BNC XML Edition, BNC Baby, and BNC Sampler corpora. You can download the latest version of XAIRA from SourceForge.net and more information about the software can be found on the XAIRA webpage.

See the next section for some examples of how XAIRA can be used to search the BNC.

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