Corpus Manager: A tool for multilingual corpus analysis

The vast amount of electronic texts in the web facilitates the creation of megacorpora at a very short time. However, as the corpus size increases, the complexity of its management is becoming a serious problem limiting its functionality. Furthermore, a great deal of corpus linguistics research is based on the quantitative comparison of small corpus samples, which are drawn from a bigger general language corpus based on specific criteria such as authorship, topic, genre, register etc (Biber 1993). For these reasons a number of tools have already been developed and aim to organize and handle texts in corpora (e.g. Christ 1994, Holmes-Higgin et al. 1994). However, most of the developed systems have a significant learning curve and limited flexibility regarding the metadata which can be used as subcorpus selection criteria.