COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS FOR MANAGING LARGE TEXT CORPORA: THE SEARCH ENGINE 'HOLMES'

Large text corpora management requires sophisticated computational tools. For highly inflecting languages like Polish homonymy is a challenge computer men have to face; in Polish texts, every 42nd word per 100 is grammatically ambiguous. A search engine 'Holmes', designed by Michal Rudolf, works as a disambiguator, rather than a tagger. It operates on texts which are morphologically marked before by special programs. After the user keyboards her query 'Holmes' examines sets of tags for each word, rejecting as many improper interpretations as possible. 'Holmes' makes use of linguistic, not statistical methods of disambiguation. It is based upon a number of rules formalizing various contextual restrictions on words. Query results are obtainable online.