The Linguist

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The Linguists Search Engine

• 02/04/2004

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Background

• Address http//lse.umiacs.umd.edu/
• Developed at the University of Maryland by
  Resnik, Elkiss et al. in collaboration with
  Fellbaum (Princeton) and Olsen (Microsoft).
• Accessible to a general audience since 20 January
  2004 (brand new!)
• No fees or complicated registration process

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Some Facts Built-in Corpus

• Preprocessed corpus of about three million
  sentences taken from the Internet Archive
  www.archive.org
• Automatically annotated in Penn Treebank style
  syntactic bracketing
• Relies on computational linguistic tools (such as
  MXTERMINATOR, MXPOST, Charniaks stochastic
  parser, the Minipar Parser, Wordnet, etc.)

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Searching the built-in corpus

• Nice features
• Query by example
• Limited regular expressions support (e.g.
  disjunction, negation)
• Wordnet relations are supported
• Save queries for later reuse
• Offensive content filter (for less embarrassing
  live demonstrations)
• Problems
• Only English is supported (without even once
  mentioning this fact anywhere in the
  documentation!)

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Demo Simple Search

• Simple search of the built-in corpus
• Query by example
• Search for of-genitive constructions
• Query by hand
• Search for s-genitives where the possessor is
  not a proper name (i.e. NNP / NNPS)
• Searching for synonyms of fearsome
  fearsomea1/syns
• GO TO THE LSE

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Some Facts Customized Corpora

• You can build your own collection of sentences
  and have them annotated
• Uses AltaVista as a basis for web-wide search
  www.altavista.com (about 1.000.000 pages)
• Extracts sentences from retrieved pages and
  annotates them
• Job-based with fair scheduling procedures
• Query syntax restricted to AltaVista queries plus
  expansion of inflectional forms

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Demo Customized Collection

• Demo search on a collection of sentences with the
  verb give
• How to start a new collection
• GO TO THE LSE

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Further Information

• LSE Starters Guide lse.umiacs.umd.edu/lse_guide.
  html
• LSE Users Guide lse.umiacs.umd.edu/lseuser/lseus
  er.pdf
• LSE Users Forum lse.umiacs.umd.edu/forum
• AltaVista Documentation www.altavista.com/help/se
  arch/help_adv
• Penn Tagset www.computing.dcu.ie/acahill/tagset.
  html
• Still ugly but flexible alternative
  www.stanford.edu/jstrunk/