Principles, Implementation Strategies, and Evaluation of a Corpus Query System

The last decade has seen an increase in the number of available corpus query systems. These systems generally implement a query language as well as a database model. We report on one such corpus query system, and evaluate its query language against a range of queries and criteria quoted from the literature. We show some important principles of the design of the query language, and argue for the strategy of separating what is retrieved by a linguistic query from the data retrieved in order to display or otherwise process the results, stating the needs for generality, simplicity, and modularity as reasons to prefer this strategy.