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Basics of Concordance? In Indic languages, we often think about the language tools like Spell checker, Grammar checker, Dictionaries, but we not ever thought about a basic tool that can serve as a basic tool for a language named "Concordancer". We not ever thought about "corpus" for our regional languages. Now let us see some details on Concordance process, Concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. That is finding and tabulating all the key words in a book or any large written work. This very difficult to do this task with manual work only, that's why concordance is made only to very important books like Bible, works of Shakespeare and like such books. However, when computers came, this task is made easy somewhat. But producing a complete concordance is not easy only with computers; more manual work is also needed. Because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances. However when concordancing a text with computer, searching and arranging words are made easy and even more accurate than done with manual effort.
Uses of Concordance Most may say that concordance is a tool in linguistics only, but the fact is when concordance is effectively implemented it can do much more than what is really assumed. Understanding and using concordance in a database will provide more comforts. Especially languages that are developing in computing field now can utilize this facility more effectively. More refined and object oriented tasks can be made by the use of concordance. General uses of a concordance are,
- Comparing different usages of the same word
- Analyzing keywords
- Analyzing word frequencies
- Finding and analyzing phrases and idioms
- Creating indexes and word lists
Uses of Concordance in Language computing...
- Developing tools for searching
- Effective adoption of vocabulary
- Developing a very effective database in regional languages
- Very accurate and faster searching and listing of required.
- Can change the methods of search engines in regional languages
- Can be used in Machine Translation
- Can be used in Spelling and Grammar tools as a back end
- This is the real way of doing text analysis in a language
Concordancer Concordancer is a computer program or a tool that can generate concordance of a given text. Basically, concordance is a method of creating databases from electronic texts. The software, which does this kind of transition, is called as a concordancer. The list that is created by a concordancer may or may not have lists with frequencies of a particular word. The database or output which is created by a concordancer may serve as a input some language computing tools like Spell checker, grammar checker, search engines, text analysis tools etc., Results of a concordancer will have list of phrases or sentences those contain the given word. Usually show at a glance that some combination of words occur together much more often than others, identifying combinations that are not merely frequent but also statistically significant. The database from which the list is being populated is may or may not be created by the concordancers. Database, which is created, is called as corpus. Corpus is a database of words in a language in machine-readable form available for computational analysis. Every language that is having good language computational tools has this corpus and frequently updated with emerging words in the language. This kind of corpus is very important and a basic tool for a language.
Need of Concordance tools As of now, regional language computing is still in the beginning stage only. Many tasks in language computing is yet to be done. The tasks left in regional language computing are can be done using the concordance tools easily. Concordance in a language can provide effective base for tools in language computing. Tools like Spell checker, grammar checker can use output from a concordancer. Many regional languages lack in computational linguistics only. (Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics).
Effective use of concordance tools for a language will give the solutions for computational linguistic needs from basic spell checking to machine translation. Because every aspect in computational linguistics depend on effective database management of the particular language. This database management is not only depends on simple database software, but also depends more on concordance program. Because concordance program provides effective data management and retrieval of a particular language. Effectiveness will ensure usage of the outputs to basic spell checking to Machine translations. Therefore, concentration on developing concordancers in regional languages will initiate every need of regional language computations. |