Searching the corpus

APLS provides powerful search capabilities for finding linguistic patterns¹ in the interview data. It all starts from the search page: https://apls.pitt.edu/labbcat/search. Once you create a search, you can export the results in a variety of formats.

Because the search page has many options that will be of interest to a variety of different researchers, this documentation page is more focused on giving users an understanding of the search page capabilities through TRY IT! tutorials. If you would like to understand the data structure that the search page relies on, read the Layers and attributes and Layer typology documentation pages.

If you are looking for information on the search results page, go to the Exporting data documentation.

On this page

1. What you can do on the search page
   1. Layout

What you can do on the search page

The search page allows you to…

• Search APLS data for specific patterns.
  • These patterns can target:
    • single words
    • part-of-speech tags
    • phonological features
    • segments within words
      • Such as finding all instances of a specific vowel or all instances of a consonant cluster.
    • multiple words
    • multiple layers
      • Such as finding a specific word tagged as a certain part-of-speech.
    • multiple words and layers
• Filter searches by specific participants and transcripts
• Configure your search with different search options

Layout

There are five main sections of the search page:

1. Participants and transcripts filters
2. Search options
3. Layer picker
4. Pattern input fields
5. Search progress bar

Only the first four sections are displayed when you first load the search page, as shown in the screengrab below.

The progress bar only pops up once you actually click Search, like in the screengrab below.

1. The term patterns is used throughout this page because the search function is capable of matching exact words, affixes, individual sound segments, stress, part of speech, and much more! ↩

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