User-Friendly Interfaces for Corpora of Slovene
User-Friendly Interfaces for Corpora of Slovene

Summary/Abstract: The majority of corpus tools has been designed for lexicographers and linguists, and it was only later that they have become available to non-linguists. Consequently, the functionality of the tools that are currently available is limited, and only occasionally are they used for purposes other than research. The main reason for it is there being too many complex functions in the interface, and often no assistance provided to less experienced users. Other drawbacks are applications working too slowly and including too many specialized linguistic terms. The paper presents the procedure of designing interface for concordancers within two corpora of Slovene: the new reference corpus (http://www.gigafida.net) and the corpus of spoken Slovene (http://korpus-gos.net), with user-friendliness as the main feature to be taken into account. The search engine’s design was based both on the analysis of various online interfaces for the existing corpora, and on the evaluation of FidaPLUS interface by means of an online survey conducted in 2007. The two concordancers look similar and offer two types of search options: simple queries for less experienced users and advanced queries for more experienced ones. Additionally, the search engine for the spoken language corpus enables queries concerning spoken variants (by means of introducing pronunciation-based spelling) or standardized forms (by means of standardized spelling). New user-friendly interfaces will hopefully render Slovene corpora accessible not only to professionals, but also to anyone learning the language, or simply being interested in it. It is also intended that a separate interface be designed for primary and secondary school teachers.

• Details
• Contents