• Old Norse Character Set
• Reference Variables
• The TACTweb Query Language
  • The Basics
• The TACTweb Query in Detail
  • Selection Sources
  • Selection Refinements
• Regular Expressions
  • Regular Expression Examples
• Co-occurrences
  • Co-occurrence Examples
• FREQ selection
• WHEN refinement
  • Simple WHEN Selection Format

The following characters are used at this TACTweb site. (Please read the instructions above.)

	Windows Capital	Windows Small	Mac Capital	Mac Small
Þ/þ	Alt-0222	Alt-0254	Shift-Option-5	Shift-Option-6
Ð/ð	Alt-0208	Alt-0240	Shift-Option-3	Shift-Option-4
Á/á	Alt-0193	Alt-0225	Option-e followed by the letter
É/é	Alt-0201	Alt-0233
Í/í	Alt-0205	Alt-0237
Ó/ó	Alt-0211	Alt-0243
Ú/ú	Alt-0218	Alt-0250
Ý/ý	Alt-0221	Alt-0253	Option-t	Shift-Option-7
Ö/ö	Alt-0214	Alt-0246	Option-u followed by the letter
Ü/ü	Alt-0220	Alt-0252
Æ/æ	Alt-0198	Alt-0230	Shift-Option-'	Option-'
Å/å	Alt-0197	Alt-0229	Shift-Option-a	Option-a
Ø/ø	Alt-0216	Alt-0248	Shift-Option-o	Option-o

The following characters are not used at this site, but may be used at other TACTweb sites.

	Windows Capital	Windows Small	Mac Capital	Mac Small
Ä/ä	Alt-0196	Alt-0228	Option-u followed by the letter
Ë/ë	Alt-0203	Alt-0235
Ï/ï	Alt-0207	Alt-0239
ÿ		Alt-0255		n/a
À/à	Alt-0192	Alt-0224	Option-` followed by the letter
È/è	Alt-0200	Alt-0232
Ì/ì	Alt-0204	Alt-0236
Ò/ò	Alt-0210	Alt-0242
Ù/ù	Alt-0217	Alt-0249
Â/â	Alt-0194	Alt-0226	Option-i followed by the letter
Ê/ê	Alt-0202	Alt-0234
Î/î	Alt-0206	Alt-0238
Ô/ô	Alt-0212	Alt-0244
Û/û	Alt-0219	Alt-0251
Ã/ã	Alt-0195	Alt-0227	Option-n followed by the letter
Õ/õ	Alt-0213	Alt-0245
Ñ/ñ	Alt-0209	Alt-0241
Ç/ç	Alt-0199	Alt-0231	Shift-Option-c	Option-c
ß		Alt-0223		Option-s

The Basics

1. Word forms can be entered directly. To enter more than one form in a query, separate them by commas:

moon, sun (displays occurrences of the words "moon" and "sun")
"when (use a single" to specify a query language reserved word like "when")

2. Use the regular expression notation ".*" to specify a wildcard sequence:

abs.* (displays words beginning with "abs")
.*ent (displays words ending with "ent")
c.*ons (displays words beginning with "c", ending with "ons")
.*ite.* (displays words containing "ite")

To see more on regular expressions, click here.

3. Use the | operator to request a phrase:

my | lov.* (displays phrases beginning with the word "my" and followed immediately by any word starting with "lov")
my | (displays all words that immediately follow the word "my")

The discussion below introduces some variations.

4. Request co-occurrence patterns with the operators "&" or "~":

moon & star.* (displays all occurrences of "moon" that occur near to a word beginning "star")
moon ~ star.* (displays all occurrences of "moon" that do not occur near a "star" word)

For more information about the co-occurrence syntax, click here.

5. Any of the above selection tools can be followed by a "when" refinement:

moon.* ; when speaker = bottom (selects only those words starting with the letters "moon" when spoken by the character "Bottom")

Both the semi-colon and the word "WHEN" are required. For more information, click here.

All TACTweb selection queries start with some type of initial selection called a source. Some also contain refinements or filters that modify the initial selection. The general form is:

   <sources> ; <refinements>

Selection Sources

   source 1 , source 2 , ...

• Vocabulary Words: Any vocabulary word can be given. If the word is reserved within the TACTweb query language, precede it with an (unmatched) '"', e.g. "when.
• Regular Expressions: Regular expressions allow you to select word forms based on letter patterns within that word. To see information on how to formulate regular expressions, click here.
• Frequency: The FREQ selection criteria can be used as a source or a refinement to select words according to frequency of occurrence. For more information about it click here.
• SIMIL: The SIMIL selector selects word types based on their similarity to a given pattern, e.g.: "SIMIL love 70%". This selects words with letter sequences that are more than 70% similar to "love".
• Phrase Selection: Any of the above selection tools can be combined into phrases by joining them with the "|" operator, e.g. "my | lov.*" chooses phrases beginning with the word "my" and followed immediately by any word starting with "lov". The ">" character can be used to select positions other than the first word in the phrase: e.g. "my | > lov.*" will save the "lov" words. The ">" character may be placed by itself before or after the phrase: "> | my | lov.*" chooses all word immediately before the phrase; "my | > | lov.*" chooses all phrases beginning with the word "my", followed by any word, and then followed by a "lov" word. The middle, unspecified, word is saved in the resulting list.
• Co-occurrence Selection: Any of the above selection tools can be combined into expressions involving the co-occurrence operators "&", "~". For more information about the co-occurrence syntax, click here.
• Exclusion: The "-" operator can be used: <source 1> - <source 2> produces a list of items that are in <source 1> but are not in <source 2>.

   <sources> ; <refinement> ; <refinement> ...

• FREQ: The FREQ operator can be used as a refinement. For more information about it, click here.
• POS: The POS operator needs no further specification information. It transforms each word (type) entry it is given into a list of positions where that word occurs: e.g: "earth; pos"
• REGEXP: Regular expressions can be used as a refinement, e.g.: "freq 1; REGEXP a.*" chooses all word forms occurring once that start with the letter "a". For more information on regular expression syntax, click here.
• WHEN: Can be used to select positions based on structural information in the text. For more information, click here.
• SIMIL: The SIMIL operator (described above) can also act as a refinement, e.g.: "l.*; simil love 75%" will select all words beginning with "l" that are more than 75% similar to "love".
• SPAN: The SPAN operator creates a resulting list that consists of all word tokens "near" to the given inputted positions ("near" is defined by the Context associated with the query). If the configuration context was 5 words on either side, for example, the selection "love; span" would select all words that occur within 5 words of "love" in the text.

Regular Expressions can be specified (a) as a source in a selection criteria statement, (b) as a refinement, or (c) as a part of a WHEN selection. In the first two instances it selects word types in the last case it selects values for structural references.

Format is a string of letters or diacritics with special characters that have special meanings interspersed. In the following, the term "word letter" means letter or diacritic. Special characters are:

• ".": Means "any word letter"
• "[...]": Means "any one of the word letters between the brackets": e.g. "[aeiou]" means "any vowel". If an alphabetically consecutive set of letters is desired, use the range selector ":" -- [a:e] means all letters between "a" and "e".
• "[~...]": Means "any word letter BUT the word letters between the brackets": e.g. "[~aeiou]" means "any letter BUT a vowel".
• "*": Means "zero or more occurrences of the PRECEDING word letter". e.g.

  e*

  means "zero or more occurrences of the word letter 'e'",

  .*

  means "zero or more occurrences of any word letter",

  [ae]*

  means "zero or more occurrences of either the letter "e" or "a".

• "\": Means "treat the following character as a letter or diacritic in a regular expression."

Use the co-occurrence operators when you wish to select positions where two or more words happen near to each other. Co-occurrence operators always produce a list of positions in the text -- they can never generate a list of words.

There are three co-occurrence operators. To use, replace "<item1>" and "<item2>" with a subordinate rule (such as a regular expression).

<item1> & <item2>

The resulting list will contain positions where item1 occurs that also have an occurrence of item2 within the range of text controlled by the context. The context is specified in the "Config Context" section of the Autosection rule window (see below). This is the and operation.

<item1> ~ <item2>

The resulting list will contain positions where item1 occur that do not have an occurrence of item2 within the range of text controlled by the context. The context is specified in the "Config Context" section of the Autosection rule window (see below). This is the exclusion operation.

Items within the list can be a word from the vocabulary, a regular expression, a category name, or many other basic selection rule types. In addition, an item may be any further subordinate co-occurrence selection criteria. In this case, the subordinate criteria must be surrounded by brackets "(" and ")".

Use the FREQ selection operator when you want to select words based on frequency of occurrence. When used as a source (e.g. "FREQ 5"), FREQ selects words based on their frequency in the entire text. When used as a refinement (e.g. "l.* ; FREQ 5", words are selected according to their number of occurrences in the given list.

You give numbers to use as criteria for frequency selection. The forms are:

• You can give a single number, or number range: "FREQ 5" or "FREQ 5:8".
• You can use the "<", "<=", ">", or ">=" operators: "FREQ <= 6".
• If you enclose the specification in parentheses, you can specify more than one condition, separating each by a comma: "FREQ (< 10, > 100)", "FREQ (10:12, 50:58)".

The following is a partial description of WHEN refinement syntax. For more information, refer to the User's Guide for TACT. An example of WHEN refinement in use is:

   lov.* ; when speaker = romeo

   choose from ; WHEN Ref ID = selection list

Web design Alex Stevens, content Geoffrey Rockwell and John Bradley. March 7, 1997