Key Node in Context (KNIC) Concordances: Improving Usability of an Old French Treebank

Abstract

While annotated treebanks are an invaluable tool in linguistic research, the tree-based form in which corpus search tools often present search results is not necessarily well-suited to the user’s requirements. We argue that a concordance style export of search results, built around a user-identified "key node" in the query, represents a useful synoptic view of the data for the user needing to carry out further manual analysis of query results. We present a first implementation of these 'KNIC' concordances for an Old French corpus, using the TigerSearch treebank search engine integrated into the TXM corpus analysis platform.