GlossaNet 2: a linguistic search engine for RSS-based corpora

This paper presents GlossaNet 2, a free online concordance service that enables users to search into dynamic Web corpora. Two steps are involved in using GlossaNet. First, users define a corpus by selecting RSS feeds in a preselected pool of sources (they can also add their own RSS feeds). These sources will be visited on a regular basis by a crawler in order to generate a dynamic corpus. Second, the user can register one or more search queries on his/her dynamic corpus. Search queries will be re-applied on the corpus every time it is updated and new concordances will be recorded for the user (results can be emailed, published for the user in a privative RSS feed, or they can be viewed online). This service integrates two preexisting software: Corporator (Fairon, 2006), a program that creates corpora by downloading and filtering RSS feeds and Unitex (Paumier, 2003), an open source corpus processor that relies on linguistic resources. After a short introduction, we will briefly present the concept of “RSS corpora ” and the assets of this approach to corpus development. We will then give an overview of the GlossaNet architecture and present various cases of use. 1