January 20, 2004

Linguist's Search Engine

I'm happy to announce that the Linguist's Search Engine is now up and running and available for use.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we've been at work on an easy-to-use Web tool that permits linguists to do searches they could not easily do on Google or Altavista -- for example, searches involving syntactic structure, non-contiguous constructions, and the like. (I myself am interested in phenomena having to do with verb-argument realization, and there's just no way to ask a standard bag-of-words search engine for, say, all inflections of such-and-such verb used without a direct object NP.)

If we've done it right, what you'll find at http://lse.umiacs.umd.edu/ should be pretty self-explanatory. For those who prefer explanations of the non-self variety, we also have a Getting Started Guide. For those prefer to RTFM, feel free to R TFM. Finally, there is a discussion forum that will, we hope, give rise to a genuine LSE user community.

Please bear with us if there are technical glitches as we get started!

(One such glitch I just discovered: once you've registered, if your confirmation message sends you to http://sprinkles.umiacs.umd.edu, don't go there: that's an old message. Instead use the Log In link at http://lse.umiacs.umd.edu.)

Posted by Philip Resnik at January 20, 2004 06:30 PM