Sara, a definite tool to use the BNC

The British National Corpus has a wide collection of texts which users can easily consult using the tool linked to it: Sara . This is a tool with a unique feature: it can search not only words or phrases but other information contained in the texts compilated. It also allows to limit the search to particular categories or domains. But, how can we get and use Sara?

Given the wide amount of texts included in the BNC and the system of SGML tags it uses, we would need huge hard disks to store all the corpus in our computers plus a program to decode SGML. Therefore, there were two major problems that the creators of the BNC had to deal with: the impossibility of storing all the texts in a PC and the obtention of the SGML programmes -which are normaly free and bad or good but expensive.

The solution they found for the first question was to allow the use of the BNC installing the corpus in a server. For the second matter the included Sara in the website. You only have to install it in the computer and, when you try to execute it, it accesses to the server through the Internet.

The website includes some practical instructions to use Sara and to get started with it making it easier to find whatever information you are looking for. It also contains some examples and help with the creation of  word, phrase or part of speech queries. And then, it is ready to use!

 

Bibliography

 

British National Corpus Website, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/tools/index.xml, (Accessed 13/05/08 )

Pérez Guerra, Javier, “British National Corpus & Sara”, http://webs.uvigo.es/h04/jperez/bnc/, (Acessed 13/05/08 )

Wikipedia contributors, “British National Corpus,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_National_Corpus&oldid=203756426 (Accessed May 13, 2008 )