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<Paper uid="W00-1324">
  <Title>A query tool for syntactically annotated corpora*</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="195" end_page="197" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion and future work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, I have presented a query tool for syntactically annotated corpora that is developed for the German Verbmobil treebank annotated at the University of Tiibingen. The key idea is to extract in an initializing phase the information one wants to search for from the corpus and to store it in a relational database. The search itself is done by translating an input query that is an expression in a simple quantifier free first order logic into an SQL query that is then passed to the database system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> An obvious advantage of this architecture is that a considerable amount of work is taken over by the database management system and therefore needs not to be implemented. Furthermore, the mysql indexing functionalities can be used to directly affect the performance of the search.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The query tool is work in progress, and I briefly want to point out some of the things that still need to be done. First, the set of queries the tool can process needs to be extended to all queries allowed in the query language. This will be done very soon. Another task for the near future is, as mentioned in the previous section, to add an or- null dering mechanism on binary conjuncts in order to ensure that the more restrictive node pairs are searched for first. Further, the design of a graphical user-interface to enter the queries is planned, allowing to specify queries by drawing partial trees instead of typing in the expressions in the query language. Finally, we also want to implement a web-based user-interface for the query tool.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Besides these tasks that all concern the current query tool for the German Verbmobil corpus, a more general issue to persue in the future is to adapt the tool to other corpora. In some cases, this implies a modification of the way binary relations are precompiled, and in some other cases this would even lead to a modification of the query language and the database schema, namely in those cases where other binary relations are needed, e.g. the coindexation relation in the case of the Penn Treebank.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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