ReSiPC: A tool for complex searches in parallel corpora

Abstract

In this paper, a tool specifically designed to allow for complex searches in large parallel corpora is presented. The formalism for the queries is very powerful as it uses standard regular expressions that allow for complex queries combining word forms, lemmata and POS-tags. As queries are performed over POS-tags, at least one of the languages in the parallel corpus should be POS-tagged. Searches can be performed in one of the languages or in both languages at the same time. The program is able to POS-tag the corpora using the Freeling analyzer through its Python API. ReSiPC is developed in Python version 3 and it is distributed under a free license (GNU GPL). The tool can be used to provide data for contrastive linguistics research and an example of use in a Spanish-Croatian parallel corpus is presented. ReSiPC is designed for queries in POS-tagged corpora, but it can be easily adapted for querying corpora containing other kinds of information.