Documentation

CWB manuals – CQPweb docs – CQi tutorial

When you download and install any of the CWB projects, you will find some documentation is present within the download, usually with a helpful name, such as README or INSTALL or similar. However, the most extensive documentation is in the form of manuals that are accessible separately. These are listed on this page.

CWB manuals

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Currently, the official CWB documentation consists of two detailed manuals on the CWB core, which document the corpus encoding procedure, the CQP query language, and interactive use of the CQP query processor.

• CQP Query Language Manual: PDF (0.8 MiB) – Online Version

  This manual is essential reading for all CWB users, and serves as comprehensive documentation both for the CQP query language and for the CQP query processor (as an interactive command-line program). In order to try the examples in the manual, either download the pre-encoded sample corpora or use the online CQP demos.

• Corpus Encoding Manual: PDF (0.6 MiB) – data package (.zip, 0.1 MiB) – Online Version

  This guide is intended for corpus administrators and all other users who want to index their own corpora or extract frequency information from a CWB corpus. It is highly recommended to install the CWB/Perl packages first, which include various tools to simplify and optimise the corpus encoding procedure.

CQPweb documentation

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The most extensive guide for installing and managing CQPweb is its system administrator's manual, available within the CQPweb code itself (under doc) as well as from this website.

• CQPweb System Administrator's Manual: PDF (0.3 MiB)

  Please note that this is not targeted at users of CQPweb, but rather at superusers who actually run a server (or advahnced users who run CQPweb on a standalone machine). It assumes a basic knowledge of administration of Unix-like systems in general.

Users interested in installing CQPweb on Windows might take a look at Peter Uhrig's guide to installing CQPweb on Windows Subsystem for Linux.

CQi — a client-server protocol for the CWB

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The corpus query interface (CQi) is a remote client-server API that provides low-level corpus access as well as (almost) complete CQP functionality. Its main purpose is to enable CWB-based development in programming languages which cannot easily be linked to C libraries or run an interactive CQP backend.

The CWB core includes a stand-alone CQPserver that implements the CQi protocol. A reference implementation of a CQi client interface is included in CWB/Perl.

Available documentation:

• The CQi tutorial gives a first impression of the functionality and usage of the CQi client-server API.
• The CQi specification (.zip, 0.1 MiB) lists available CQi commands and defines the corresponding bytecodes, with suitable header files for various programming languages.

The CQi specification as it stands applies to Versions 3.0 to 3.5 of CWB. You may confidently expect things to be fundamentally different in CWB 4.0.