5.1 The matching strategy

• set MatchingStrategy (shortest | standard | longest);

• in shortest mode, ?, * and + operators match smallest number of tokens possible (refers to regular expressions at token level)
  $\Rightarrow$ finds shortest sequence matching query,
  $\Rightarrow$ optional elements at the start or end of the query will never be included

• in longest mode, ?, * and + operators match as many tokens as possible

• in the default standard mode, CQP uses an ``early match'' strategy: optional elements at the start of the query are included, while those at the end are not

• the somewhat inconsistent matching strategy of earlier CQP versions is currently still available in the traditional mode, and can sometimes be useful (e.g. to extract cooccurrences between multiple adjectives in a noun phrase and the head noun)

  > [pos="JJ"]+ [pos="NNS?"];
> group Last matchend lemma by match lemma;

  only gives the intended frequency counts in traditional mode

• Figure 4 shows examples for all four matching strategies

  Figure 4: CQP matching strategies.