Searching for inverted matches

Searching for inverted matches allows you to find results that don’t match specified parts of your search pattern. You can choose to do an inverted match search on a layer by using the matches drop-down menu.

On this page
  1. Searching for results that don’t match
  2. Excluding stop-words

Searching for results that don’t match

The matches drop-down menu is located below the layer name of the input field. This drop-down menu lets you select whether the search will identify annotations that match your input pattern or annotations that don’t match your input pattern.

However, a simple search for non-matches could be to find all the words in APLS that are not the word “penguins”:

To find all instances of words that are not the word “penguins”:

  1. Go to the search page.
  2. Enter penguins into the orthography input field.
  3. Click the matches drop-down menu for the orthography input field and select doesn’t match.
  4. Click the Search button.

Non-matching searches can also be combined with regex patterns to specify a range of values to not match. For example, you could find all words with no consonants in APLS by using a doesn’t match search on the phonemes layer:

  1. Go to the search page.
  2. Select the phonology project in the layer picker and click the checkbox for the phonemes layer to make the phonemes input field appear.
  3. Enter .* in the phonemes input field.
  4. Click the drop-down menu button () and select CONSONANT:.
  5. Enter .* again at the end of the phonemes input field.
  6. Click the matches drop-down menu for the phonemes input field and select doesn’t match.
  7. Click the Search button.

The doesn’t match option is also useful when used with multiple layers, as described in the Searching multiple layers section of the Searching with complex patterns page.

Excluding stop-words

One useful application of the doesn’t match option is removing stop-words: highly frequent lexical items that are often treated as outside the bounds of typical linguistic processes. For example, analyses of vowels’ acoustic measurements often exclude words that are likely to undergo vowel reduction. To exclude stop-words, set the orthography layer to doesn’t match the list of stop-words separated by |.

Let’s find all words that contain /æ/, excluding an, and, as, at, or that.

  1. On the search page, select the phonemes layer to make the phonemes field appear.
  2. Enter .* in the phonemes input field.
  3. Click the drop-down menu button () and select æ.
  4. Enter .* again at the end of the phonemes input field.
  5. Select doesn’t match for the orthography input field.
  6. Enter an|and|as|at|that in the orthography input field.
  7. Click the Search button.

There is no definitive list of stop-words—different analyses may require wider or narrower definitions of how to decide whether a word should be excluded. To guide your decisions, it can be useful to create a wider search initially, then use the Dictionary export option to find the unique words that your search returns.