Reflections and a Proposal for a Query and Reporting Language for Richly Annotated Multiparallel Corpora

Large and open multiparallel corpora are a valuable resource for contrastive corpus linguists if the data is annotated and stored in a way that allows precise and flexible ad hoc searches. A linguistic query language should also support computational linguists in automated multilingual data mining. We review a broad range of approaches for linguistic query and reporting languages according to usability criteria such as expressibility, expressiveness, and efficiency. We propose an architecture that tries to strike the right balance to suit practical purposes