Sunday, February 26, 2012

CasualConc beta update and more

I haven't updated this blog for a while, but I have made a few bug fixes and a few feature additions. I also added a small utility program that accompanies CasualConc.

Bug fixes
Concord
- Tag search mode should work now

Word Count
- The counts of files that particular words appear are not correctly displayed in the Database mode with the lemmatize option on
- Keyness statistics are correctly calculated in the Database mode with lemmatize option on
- Specified string search mode is functional in the Database mode
- Tag list creation should work now

Enhancements
General
- Corpus/database switching in the Advanced Corpus Handling mode is now available in Concord and Collocation; you can switch them directly on each tool
- When exporting results in CSV or Tab-delimited format, you can select .txt in addition to .csv, though the default is still .csv.
- You can specify context tags (or any strings) to limit the search only to specific section(s) (See Preferences -> Tags)
- Enhancements on Context Tags to Ignore Settings in Preferences
- You can now specify ** to ignore any character in brackets (i.e. <>)
- You can now add files to a selected corpus/database by drag&drop when files are shown in Advanced Mode

Concord
- You can edit the preset sort orders in Preferences -> Concord (this might have been introduced before)

Word Count
- Specified strong search has search history
- Search function on the result table is enhanced

Corpus File Information
- You can count sets of words/phrases for each selected corpus/database in Word Group Freq Table; the format is as follows: Group Name->word1,word2,...


CasualConc Viewer
It's been reported that CasualConc crashes when scrolling fast on result tables. This is not a bug of this particular program but a bug of the program environment CasualConc depends on (RubyCocoa). I've asked the maintainer of RubyCocoa to fix the bug, but it hasn't been resolved yet, so I decided to create a viewer app. This viewer is written in MacRuby and table view is much more stable.

To use the viewer, after you create KWIC results or any lists on a table, go to Misc -> Open with Viewer. If you want to view the results on the right table on Cluster and Word Count, go to Misc -> Open with Viewer (Right).


The viewer is just a viewer, so you can't do much. I might add a few more functions, but if you want to export results or calculate statistics, you should do it on CasualConc.


e-lemma file
With the current beta (1.9.0), e-lemma file is included in the disk image (with a permission). e-lemma file is a lemma list file created by Prof. Yasumasa Someya at Kansai University. You can import the list for lemmatization on CasualConc.

Another file, a-e spelling differences, is a list of American/British spelling pairs. You can also import this list to CasualConc.

You can use the lemmatization function and the spelling variation function. When applied to a search word, you can search words of the same lemma as well as spelling variants.


If you have any other bugs, please let me know.