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This corpus contains about one billion words of Portuguese, taken from about one million web pages from four Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil, Portugal, Angola, and Mozambique). The corpus has been funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, and it has allowed us to update the original Corpus do Português (2006), which was also funded by the NEH. Click on any of the links in the search form on the search page for context-sensitive help, and to see the range of queries that the corpus offers. You might pay special attention to the comparisons between dialects and the (new) virtual corpora, which allow you to create personalized collections of texts related to a particular area of interest.
Detailed help files:
LIST display
Find single words like
misterioso,
all forms of a word like BRINCAR,
words matching patterns like
*torn*,
phrases like más * que or
NOUN VERDE.
You can also search by synonyms (e.g.
guapo), and
customized wordlists like
colores. In each case, you see each individual
matching string.
You can use parts of speech as part of your query. For example, olhos ADJ would find a two word string, composed of the word olhos followed by an adjective. Some other examples are NOUN DURO, NAME Ferreia, VERB * dinheiro, FALAR ADV, NUM pessoas, PRON DEIXAR VERB. An easy way to use part of speech tags is by selecting them from the drop-down list (click on [PoS] to show it). You can also type the part of speech tags directly into the search form. Previously, you had to use the part of speech tag (from the link above) inside of brackets, e.g. [j*]. But that's a bit cumbersome for mobile phones, and there are now different ways of specifying the part of speech -- all of which work equally as well. For example, all of the following would find the same strings: olhos ADJ, olhos [j*], olhos J, olhos _j.
If you are using Type 1 or Type 4 above, you can use wildcards for the part of speech tag. For example, [nn2*] = plural nouns, [n*] = all nouns, [*n*] = nouns (including ambiguous noun/adj tags), etc. If you are using Type 2 or Type 3, it needs to be upper case: NOUN duro. You can also add a part of speech tag to the end of any word, but you need to use either Type 1 or Type 4 above. For example, trabalho would find trabalho with any part of speech, but trabalho_n or trabalho.[n*] would limit it to trabalho as a noun, and trabalho.[v*] or trabalho_v would limit it to trabalho as a verb. Make sure that you separate the word and the part of speech with a period / full stop and bracket (Type 1) or an underscore (Type 4), and that there is no space. If you don't know what the part of speech tag is for a given word (or the words in a phrase), just select [OPTIONS] and then [GROUP BY] = [NONE] (SHOW POS). For example, see the PoS tags for luz, fizemos, bonitas, or em lugar de If you capitalize an entire word, it will find all forms of that word. For example, DECIR would find all forms of decir (dizem, disseram, dirão, etc), whereas dizer would just find the single form dizer. Another example: =INTELIGENTE would find all of the synonyms of sabio (sábio, sábias, capaz, capaces, etc), whereas =inteligente would just find inteligente, sábio, capaz, etc. You can search by all of the synonyms of a given word, which provides powerful "semantically-based" searches of the corpus. For example, you can find the synonynms of bonito, barulho, or publicar. Of course you can use the synonyms as part of phrases as well. For example, =PUBLICAR * NOUN, =ALUNO =INTELIGENTE, or =ARGUMENT0 LÓGICO. As the last example shows, synonyms can be very useful when you are a non-native speaker, and you want to know which related words are used in a particular context. As =PUBLICAR * NOUN shows, not every token will actually be a synonym of a given word in every case. For example, lançar may be a synonym of publicar in one context, but not in many others. Note that it is often also useful to find all forms of the synonyms, by capitalizing the word: PUBLICAR. And of course you can combine these as well, for example all forms of all synonyms of publicar. Finally, note that you can click on the [S] to find synonyms for each word in the results set. This allows you to follow a "synonym chain" from one word to another to another... "User lists" or "customized lists" are word lists that you create -- relating to a certain topic (e.g. sports, clothing, or emotions), words that are grammatically related (e.g. a certain subset of adverbs or pronouns), or any other listing that you might want. For example, click here to run a query based on two sample word lists that we created -- one with a list of colors, and the other with a short list of parts of clothing. There
are two ways to create a customized list: You can later view the lists that you have created, and modify the wordlist (add or delete words), or delete a list entirely. Once created, you can re-use a wordlist in queries at any time in the future -- they remain stored in the database on the server. The easiest way to include a list in the main search window is to just select it in the wordlist window. If desired, you can also type it into the search form directly. The format is: @listName 1.Select [SAVE LISTS] = 'YES' in the search form 2. Run a query, such as (finding synonyms of bonito) 3. Select and de-select words from the list by clicking in the checkbox to the left of each word. Only the words that you select will be saved to the list. You can use the checkbox to the left of the [CONTEXT] button to select or de-select the entire list. 4. Enter the name you want to give to the list (in this case, maybe bonito-syn). 5. Make sure you really have selected some words (step 2 above), and then click [Submit] to save your list. 6. If you want, select the list that you've saved in the customized wordlists interface. You can add to the list, modify entries (click M), or delete words from the list. 7. Finally, you can then re-use this list as part of subsequent queries. For example, if [mark_davies@byu.edu] has created and stored the list [bonito-syn] then he could find cases of SER muy followed by one of these adjectives.
Many of the examples shown in the other sections are for individual words. But you can combine the different types of searches to create fairly complex phrases. For example:
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CHART display
If you are interested in a set of words or a grammatical construction, then the LIST option shows the frequency of each matching form (deseja estar, desejaban ter, etc), while the CHART option shows the total frequency in each section. The main purpose of the CHART option is to compare the frequency in the different sections of the corpus (in PORT, the countries). For example, some variation in words and phrases: chavos, ándale, chavalo, cachaco, pololear, pibe, ordenador, chulo.
COLLOCATES display
See what words occur near other words, which provides great
insight into meaning and usage.
For example, nouns before
espesso
or after
contar con,
verbs before
calma, or any word near
garganta,
brilhar,
forte, or
rápidamente.
The collocates search finds words near another word (i.e. within a "cloud" of nearby words), whereas the
LIST search finds an exact string of words.
For both the WORD and COLLOCATES field, you can include the full range of searches, including words, lemmas, substrings, parts of speech, and synonyms. For example, the following are searches for collocates of SENTIMENTO (n): any word, nouns, adjective, the word expressar, synonyms of intenção.
Select the "span" (number of words to the left and the right) for the
collocates. Use + to search more than four words to the left or right, and 0 to
exclude the words to the left or right. If you don't select a span, it will
default to 4 words left and 4 words right.
COMPARE WORDS display
Compare the collocates of two words, to see how they differ in meaning and usage. For example,
belo and bonito,
clareza and transparência,
Brasil and Portugal.
KWIC (Keyword in Context) display
See the patterns in which a word occurs, by sorting the words to the left and/or right. For example:
relação,
claro,
preciso,
esquecer.
Select the words that you want to sort with. Select L for 1, 2, and 3 words to the left. Select R for 1, 2, and 3 words to the right. You could also, for example, sort by one word to the left, then one and two words to the right. Click * to clear the entries and start over.
SECTIONS
SHOW Determines whether the frequency is shown for each "section" of the corpus
(in the case of PORT, the country).
For example, the
synonyms of belo in
each section and
overall.
Select a section. See more about limiting to and comparing dialects. (Optional) Select a second (set of) section(s) against which to compare the sections chosen above
OTHER OPTIONS
# HITS is the number of results. # KWIC is the number of results for a KWIC (concordances) search. GROUP BY determines whether words are grouped by word form (e.g. quebra and quebraram separately), lemma (e.g. all forms of quebrar together), and whether you see the part of speech for word (e.g. trabalho as a noun and verb displayed separately). DISPLAY shows raw frequency, tokens per million words, or a combination of these. SAVE LISTS allows you to create a wordlist from the results and then re-use it later in your searches.
SORT / LIMIT
Sort by raw frequency (e.g.
* DURO
) or by "relevance" (
* DURO).
Relevance uses the
Mutual Information score.
It is often useful to specify the minumim frequency when you are sorting by "relevance", to eliminate
very low frequency strings. For example, collocates of DURO where
minimum frequency = 1 (strange once-off strings) and where
minimum frequency = 30.
Note also that when you do a collocates search and you don't specify anything for the collocates field, it will automatically set
MINIMUM to MUT INFO = 3 (Mutual Information score). It does this to remove high frequency noise words like los, de, su, etc. If you want to see
more of these words, lower the MI score; to see less, increase it.
VIRTUAL CORPORA
Create a "virtual corpus" -- essentially your own personalized corpus within PORT. You can create the corpus either by keywords in the texts (e.g. texts dealing with investments, basketball, or biology), or information about the texts (e.g. date, title, or source), or a combination of keyword and text information. You can then edit your virtual corpora, search within a particular virtual corpus, compare the frequency of a word, phrase or grammatical construction in your different virtual corpora, and also create "keyword lists" based on the texts in your virtual corpus. Click on any of the links above for more information. To create a virtual corpus by keywords, enter a word or phrase to the left, and then set TEXTS/VIRTUAL to FIND TEXTS (try it -). You might also want to set SORT/LIMIT to RELEVANCE and MINIMUM FREQUENCY to something like 5 (the minimum number of times you want the word to occur in an article) (try it -). After clicking SUBMIT, you will see a list of matching texts from the corpus. For example, see matching texts for investimento, proteína, or foguete. On the "results" page, choose how many texts you want in your virtual corpus, and then click SAVE TEXT. After the virtual corpus is created, you might want to click on FIND KEYWORDS to see whether the corpus is providing the focus that you want. You can create a virtual corpus by selecting texts that match certain criteria -- such as title of the source (e.g. Folha) or the title of the article, the date, and so on. Click on CREATE CORPUS to the left to see the interface to select the texts. As an example, this list was created by searching for web pages about cells. Note that in that search form, you can also make sure that the texts have certain words in them. If you want more control in finding texts with certain words, you might want to search by keywords. See list that was created by searching PORT for web pages about cells.
See sample editing page (from Wikipedia corpus, but similar to PORT). Explanation: You can add to or delete texts from your virtual corpus, or move texts from one virtual corpus to another. You can also rename and delete corpora, temporarily "ignore" corpora (for example, when you're comparing corpora. Finally, you can arrange virtual corpora into user-defined categories (science, religion, sports, etc). You can see what words occur much more in a particular virtual corpus than in the corpus overall. For example, see the keywords from the virtual corpus that is composed of web pages about cells. Once you have created a virtual corpus (by keyword or by text metadata, then you can search that set of texts as though it were its own corpus. You can search for matching strings, collocates (nearby words), and retrieve re-sortable concordance (KWIC) lines. To search one of the corpora, just select it from your list of virtual corpora, and then fill out the rest of the search form as you normally would. For example, you can search for the word proteína in the célula virtual corpus. (Click on the word in the results list, and you will see that all of the occurrences are from your virtual corpus.) |
