Design and Prototypical Implementation of a Linguistic Search Engine

Goal of this thesis was to develop PigLing, a linguistic search engine. It both serves as a tool for learners of English as a second language, and provides linguists with functionality for analyzing linguistic phenomena. For these purposes, PigLing provides a powerful query language to formulate phrase queries. PigLing supports two different collections of text (corpora) and can be extended to support even more corpora.

Its prominent feature is support for half-context classes as part of search queries: Terms are assigned to these half-context classes based on their left and right half-contexts, i.e. the terms directly preceding and succeeding occurrences of a specific term. Users can specify half-context wildcards, requiring that terms assigned to specific half-context classes must appear at a certain position.

After submitting a query, users can begin to analyze the first results; further results are computed in the background and presented afterwards. The web interface also allows browsing half-context classes and terms' assignment to these classes to facilitate iterative query construction.