Indexing and Querying Linguistic Metadata and Document Content

The need for ecient corpus indexing and querying arises frequently both in machine learning-based and human-engineered natural language processing systems. This paper presents the ANNIC system, which can index documents not only by content, but also by their linguististic annotations and features. It also enables users to formulate versatile queries mix- ing keywords and linguistic information. The result consists of the matching texts in the cor- pus, displayed within the context of linguistic annotations (not just text, as is customary for KWIC systems). The data is displayed in a graphical user interface, which facilitates its ex- ploration and the discovery of new patterns, which can in turn be tested by launching new ANNIC queries.