Korpusanalysers

Corpus analyzers, also called corpus analysis tools, are software applications designed to process and explore linguistic corpora—large, structured collections of text. They enable researchers to quantify language use, discover patterns, and inspect context via concordances. Typical features include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and sometimes full parsing; search and retrieval of concordance lines in KWIC (key word in context) format; frequency lists by word form or lemma; n-gram and collocation analysis; dispersion and keyword analysis; and visualization of results such as frequency graphs and dispersion plots. Most tools support importing corpora in multiple formats and encoding standards and may integrate with annotation schemes (POS, lemma, named entities, syntactic structure).

Common types include stand-alone desktop tools such as AntConc and LancsBox, which are inexpensive or free; and more comprehensive corpus-management systems and online services like Sketch Engine and CQPweb, which support large multilingual corpora and advanced querying. Some tools integrate with corpora-as-a-service ecosystems and provide API access. Applications span linguistics research, lexicography, translation studies, sociolinguistics, language teaching, and documentation of endangered languages. The choice of tool depends on corpus size, required annotations, language coverage, and the needed outputs.

Limitations include dependency on corpus quality, potential biases, processing requirements for very large corpora, and licensing constraints for proprietary data. The field has evolved from simple concordancers to integrated platforms that combine annotation, query, and visualization to support corpus-driven research.