PaQu – Parse and Query
The PaQu web service makes it possible to search in syntactically annotated corpora in Dutch. You can parse your own Dutch text corpus or use one of two corpora provided by the developers.
Overview
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PaQu uses the Alpino parser to make treebanks of your own text corpus, and to search in these treebanks using an interface based on the LASSY Word Relations Search interface. Uploading one's own corpus requires a log-in.
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Two treebanks are already available in the application: Lassy Klein (1M words, manually checked syntactic analysis) and Lassy Groot (700M words, syntactic analysis automatically assigned by Alpino).
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PaQu offers two ways to search through the syntactically annotated texts. The first option is to use the search bar to look for word pairs, optionally complemented by their syntactic relationship. The second search option is to use the query language XPath.
Learn
Preliminaries – Alpino annotations
Using PaQu requires one to be familiar with the Alpino annotation guidelines. PaQu's own information page gives a good brief overview of all syntactic relations. For a detailed description of the syntactic annotations used by Alpino, one should check the document: Lassy Syntactische Annotatie. For the annotation of parts-of-speech and lemmas, one should check the document: Part of speech tagging en lemmatisering van het D-coi corpus. These documents are, however, only available in Dutch.
The following document (in English) may also be useful: Manual for syntactic annotators.
Querying with PaQu
PaQu offers two ways to search through the syntactically annotated texts.
The first option is to use the search bar to look for word pairs, optionally complemented by their syntactic relationship. For instance, in the image below, PaQu is told to look for the adjective (adj) taalkundig 'linguistic' that is a modifier (mod) to the noun (n) onderzoek 'research'. As said above, to use this effectively, the user must be familiar with the Alpino annotation guidelines, for which see the links provided under Preliminaries. Also check out PaQu's own information page for more tips and tricks on search for word pairs (in Dutch).
The second search option is to use the query language XPath. In the image below, the XPath query tells PaQu to look for any instance of the verb zoeken 'search' that takes a PP-complement headed by the preposition in.
Using the more advanced XPath querying method allows the user to search for more complex structures, however requires them to be familiar with the Alpino annotations, as well as XPath. A 'cookbook' for writing XPath queries for Alpino-annotated treebanks can be found here (in English). Also check out PaQu's own information page for more tips and tricks on using XPath in PaQu (in Dutch).
Local Installation
PaQu can be installed locally. For this, we refer to the tool's GitHub page (in Dutch).
Contact
Project leader: Gertjan van Noord Developer: Peter Kleiweg
Mentions
Publications
- Odijk, Jan, van Noord, Gertjan, Kleiweg, Peter & Tjong Kim Sang, Erik. (2017). The Parse and Query (PaQu) Application . In: Odijk, Jan & van Hessen, Arjan (eds.) CLARIN in the Low Countries (pp. 281-297). Ubiquity Press, London. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbi.23
Webpages
Related tools and resources
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Alpino is a parser for Dutch, used by PaQu.
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GrETEL is a tool to query-by-example corpora and treebanks that were parsed by Alpino.
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The Lassy corpus was parsed with Alpino. The Lassy Klein subcorpus was manually corrected.
- Van Noord, Gertjan, Bouma, Gosse, Van Eynde, Frank, De Kok, Daniël, Van der Linde, Jelmer, Schuurman, Ineke, Tjong Kim Sang, Erik, & Vandeghinste, Vincent (2013). Large scale syntactic annotation of written Dutch: Lassy. In Peter Spyns, & Jan Odijk (Eds.), Essential speech and language technology for Dutch: Results by the STEVIN programme (pp. 147-164). Springer Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30910-6