1. About this manual

Welcome to the TIGERSearch software suite! We are glad that you have decided to use TIGERSearch for your linguistic research.

What has TIGERSearch been designed for? The answer is simple: The TIGERSearch software let's you explore syntactically annotated text corpora. If you are a grammar engineer who is developing a grammar, you might use TIGERSearch to obtain sample sentences for the syntactic phenomena you are interested in. If you are a lexicographer or terminologist, you can employ TIGERSearch to find out lexical properties of a word like the collocations the word is used in. Generally speaking, the TIGERSearch software can be used to visualize treebanks and to extract information from treebanks.

This manual describes the concept and handling of the TIGERSearch software suite. The manual is delivered in three different versions: The hyperlinked versions (HTML and PDF) can be found in the doc/html/ and doc/pdf/ subdirectories of your TIGERSearch distribution. Another version has been integrated as an help system into the TIGERSearch software. You can activate the help system by selecting one of the items in the Help menu or by clicking the Help button in the main window of both the TIGERSearch or TIGERRegistry tool.

The present version is the hyperlinked HTML version of the manual. Follow the links to find the description you are looking for. Click on a screenshot to display a larger version of an image. To print the manual, we recommend you to use the PDF version.

What are the central chapters of this manual? Users who just want to use the query functionality of the TIGERSearch software suite should have a look at chapter III and chapter IV which describe the TIGERSearch corpus query language and the TIGERSearch query tool. Corpus administrators should also read chapter V and chapter VI which explain the TIGER-XML corpus import/export format and the TIGERRegistry corpus administration tool, respectively.

Users who are interested in the concept, design, and implementation of the TIGERSearch software should also consult Wolfgang Lezius' Ph.D. thesis [Lezius2002] (in German).

Please note: The TIGERSearch manual has been developed using the JManual environment. The JManual project is a joint initiative of the projects NITE and TIGER (cf. http://www.tigersearch.de for further information).