Queries

Phonometrica offers a number of features to find concordances in a corpus. It also allows user to customize its search interface by creating search grammars specifically tailored for a project. Concordancing features are available in the Search menu.

Simple queries

To run a new query, click on Edit > Edit new query... or use the shortcut alt+Q. This will open a new search window, which lets you search through all the annotations in your corpus.

The Files box

The Files box in the top left corner allows you to select the type of files to search in (documents or annotations). You can either select files individually if you want to restrict your query to a particular set of files, or leave all files unchecked, in which case Phonometrica will try to search in all files.

The Search box

The Search box in the top right corner allows you to enter some text or a regular expression to search for. Next to the search field, a spin box lets you select the tier you want to search in. The default choice is Any tier, which means that Phonometrica will try to find your pattern in all tiers of the selected files. You can restrict the search to a particular tier by selecting the appropriate tier number. Alternatively, you can specify a tier name pattern using a regular expression. If you do specify a tier name pattern, Phonometrica will ignore the tier number and will search instead in any tier whose name matches the pattern.

By default, the text in the search field is interpreted as a regular expression. If you are looking for plain text string instead, you can select plain text instead of regular expression in the selector located under the + and - buttons. Whether you use a plain text string or a regular expression, the search will be case-insensitive by default, which means that strings like “foo”, “Foo” and “FOO” are treated as identical. To perform a case sensitive search, simply check the case sensitive box.

Concordances in a simple query follow the KWIC model (key word in context), which means that a match is extracted along with its left and right context. (The length of the context window can be adjusted in the preferences.) When the context window is longer than the context of the match in a given item (time point or interval), Phonometrica will extract additional text in the preceeding/following items until the left/right contexts have the expected length. If it cannot find enough items, it will pad the text with white space. By default, Phonometrica will use one white space character to join the text from different intervals. You can specify a different string (including an empty string) in the Separator field.

Metadata

If you have added properties to your project, a set of field boxes will be added below the Files and Search box. Each field category is displayed as a group box containing a list of all the labels of this category. You can check or uncheck any label in any category (each category also has an All labels button to check/uncheck all labels at once). The search engine will filter files based on the conditions that you specify in the field box. Within a category, it uses the Boolean OR operator to find the subset of files that has either label. Across categories, it uses the AND operator to find the intersection of all the subsets defined by each category.

At the bottom of search window, an additional field lets you filter files based on their description. For example, it is possible to extract all the files that contain (or do not contain) a specific string.

Viewing results

Once you hit the ok button, the result of your query is presented as a new query view in the viewer. You can browse the results with the mouse wheel. The information panel on the right-hand side displays information about the selected token.

If an annotation is bound to a sound file, you can play a match by double-clicking on it or by pressing the space bar (you can also interrupt it by pressing Esc).

Right-clicking on item will display a context menu that allows you to perform a number of actions:

• Play selection: this will play the corresponding item if the annotation is bound to a sound file.

• Open in annotation: this will open the annotation in a new view, along with its sound file if it is bound to a sound.

• Open selection in Praat: if Praat is installed and configured to work with Phonometrica, this will open the match in Praat. Phonometrica will open the TextGrid (and the sound file if the annotation is bound) in Praat and will display the current match. (Note that you need to have Praat already running for this to work.)

• Edit item text: this allows you to modify the text of the item where the match was found. (Note that the query view is currently not updated to reflect this change.)

• Create table view: this will convert the concordance set, along with all its metadata, to a table that can be imported into a spreadsheet program.

• Export results to tab-separated file (CSV)...: this exports the concordance set, along with all its metadata, to a CSV file that can be imported into a spreadsheet program.

• Bookmark search result: this allows you to bookmark a matched item. Bookmarks are displayed in the bookmark panel, which can accessed by clicking on the star in the bottom left corner of the main window.

Complex queries

After performing a simple queries on a set of annotation files, Phonometrica attempts to find a set of concordances in one item (point or interval) at a time. While it is possible for an item to match a given search pattern several times if several substrings match the pattern, matches are nevertheless limited to a single item.

Sometimes, however, we might want to match text in several items simultaneously. Such a query is called a complex query in Phonometrica. There are 3 types of relations between items, detailed below: alignment, precedence and dominance.

Building a complex query

When you open a search window, two small buttons with a + and - sign appear below the main the search field. These buttons allow you to add and remove search items. Any query which has more than one search item is a complex query.

When you add one or more search items, you will notice that each of them (except the last one) is followed by a selector with 3 possible values: is aligned with, precedes and dominates. They correspond to the tier item relations alignment, precedence and dominance, respectively.

Contrary to simple queries, complex queries do not use the KWIC model to display results. Instead of displaying a matched string in its context, it lets the user select a display tier, which appears at the top of the search box. The text that is displayed is the concatenation of all the items contain within the time interval defined by simultaneous satisfaction of the constraints on each search item. Several examples are given below.

Alignment relation

Two items are aligned if they are on different tiers and their left and right boundaries coincide. Suppose that you have a word tier (tier 1), where each word was segmented, and a part-of-speech (POS) tier (tier 2) which is aligned with the word tier. To extract all the nouns in the corpus, you could do the following:

• set NOUN as the search pattern for tier 1, and choose the is aligned with value of the relation selector.

• set .+ as the search pattern for tier 2

• set the display tier to tier 2

Phonometrica will first look for all items whose text contains “NOUN” on tier 1, and will keep all those items which contain a non-empty label in an item of tier 2 which is exactly aligned with a NOUN item on tier 1. Phonometrica will then return a list of the text labels on tier 2 which match the above criteria.

As another example, suppose you now want to extract all the adverbs that end with -ly. You could do the following:

• set ADV as the search pattern for tier 1, and choose the is aligned with value of the relation selector.

• set .+ly$ as the search pattern for tier 2

• set the display tier to tier 2

Assuming that tier 2 contains exactly one word per interval, this will successfully extract all the adverbs on tier 2 that end with -ly.

Precedence relation

Two items are in a precedence relation if they immediately follow each other. You can search for arbitrarily long sequences by chaining search items on the same tier. When you specify a sequence, Phonometrica will retrieve the text from the display tier that is included within the span defined by the sequence.

Suppose that you have a word tier (tier 1) and a POS tier (tier 2), as in the alignment examples. Instead of searching for a single word, you might be interested in looking for word sequences. To find all the DET+NOUN sequences, you could do the following:

• set DET as the search pattern for the first tier item in tier 1, and choose the precedes value of the relation selector.

• set NOUN as the search pattern for the second tier item, setting the tier number to 1 to ensure you are looking in the same tier

• set the display tier to tier 2

Phonometrica will first look for all DET items on tier one, and will keep only those that are followed by a NOUN item on the same tier. It will then display the text that results from the concatenation of all the items on tier 2 within the span determined by the beginning of the DET item and by the end of NOUN item on tier 1.

Dominance relation

An item a dominates an item b if a and b are on different tier, the left boundary of b is greater or equal to that of a, and the right boundary of b is lesser or equal to that of a. Dominance relations typically encode hierarchical structures, for instance word > syllable > segment.

Suppose you have 3 tiers in your file: the first one contains spans which denote syllables, the second one contains syllabic constituents (“syll”) (“Onset”, “Nucleus”, “Coda”) and the last one individual segments (“p”, “a”, “t”…). In order to retrieve all syllables that end in a coda, you could do the following:

• set syll as the search pattern for tier 1, and choose the dominates value of the relation selector.

• set Coda as the search pattern for tier 2

• set the display tier to tier 3

This query will first get all the items that have a syll label on the first tier; then, for each of those, it will look for a label Coda on tier 2 within the limits of the span on tier 1; for each item which matches both conditions, it will display the concatenated text of the items on tier 3 that are dominated by the matching item on tier 1.