Cobuild Direct Screen Shots

1) On gaining access to Cobuild Direct through Telnet this is the first screen that the user is faced with. Most users will select options 1. or 2.

2) On selecting option 1 (the interactive corpus access tool), the user is then faced with choosing the corpus that she wants to search.

3) Here I elected to search the entire corpus, and was then faced with the search screen. It is in this screen that the user can enter just a word, or a phrase or make complex searches using various 'tags'. In this example I made a search using the following search term 'NN+and+NN+of+2is'. This means I searched for, ''any singular noun', followed by 'and', followed by 'any singular noun', followed by 'of', followed by 'zero or one or two words' followed by 'is'.

4) A few seconds later the following screen appeared to tell me how many occurrences of my search term had been found.

5) I then hit a key and the following screen appeared. It reminds me what my search term was, and informs me that the 5th item in the search term will be used as the node, i.e. the word that will appear in the centre of the screen. The 5th item is the word 'is'. I also have a choice here of selecting how many concordance lines I want to see. This is very useful when the search query produces 1000s of matches, and you only need a hundred, for example.

6) In this case, I hit 'return' to get all 146 concordance lines. At this point it is possible scroll through all the concordances via telnet, or one can save them on the Cobuild site and download the file later using some ftp software (e.g. Fetch). The user may also carry out some other operations once reaching this 'condcordance screen'. For example, she could: get an expanded content of any concordance line, get the collocates of the node word, organise collocates according to their 'Mutual Information' or 't-score', etc.