Lexical Explorer: extending access to the Database for Spoken German for user-specific purposes

Abstract

This paper presents Lexical Explorer,2 a tool that allows interactive browsing and filtering of quantitative corpus information. It further describes how this tool can be used to support linguistic work on corpora of spoken German. By using Lexical Explorer, users can analyse quantitative corpus data by interacting with frequency tables and obtaining customised word profiles of word distribution across word form variation, co-occurrences and metadata. Interaction with corpus examples of particular corpus counts is also enabled. Lexical Explorer was developed as a prototype for user-specific corpus access and is aimed at researchers of German lexicon in spoken interaction. Although Lexical Explorer was developed on the basis of two small speech corpora of the German language, the underlying principle of this tool can be easily adapted to other corpora and other user groups. Moreover, the tool can be used to gain insights into the corpus structure as well as to study and verify corpus content in a transparent and user-friendly way.