Developer(s) Lexical Computing Ltd. Operating system | Development status Active | |
 | ||
Original author(s) Initial release 23 July 2003; 13 years ago (2003-07-23) Written in C++, Python, JavaScript, jQuery | ||
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and analysis software developed by Lexical Computing Limited since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour (lexicographers, researchers in corpus linguistics, translators or language learners) to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour.
Contents
History of development
Sketch Engine is a product of Lexical Computing Limited, a company founded in 2003 by the lexicographer and research scientist Adam Kilgarriff. He started collaboration with developer of Manatee and Bonito Pavel Rychlý, a computer scientist working at the Natural Language Processing Centre at Masaryk University and introduced the concept of word sketches.
Since then, Sketch Engine is a commercial software, however all the core features of Manatee and Bonito that were developed by 2003 (and extended since then) are freely available under the GPL license within the NoSketch Engine suite.
Features
Architecture
Sketch Engine consists of three main components: an underlying database management system called Manatee, a web interface search front-end called Bonito and a web interface for corpus building and management called Corpus Architect.
Manatee
Manatee is a database management system specifically devised for effective indexing of large text corpora. It is based on the idea of inverted indexing (keeping an index of all positions of a given word in the text). It has been used for indexing of billion-word-size text corpora.
Searching corpora indexed by Manatee is performed by formulating queries in the Corpus Query Language (CQL).
Manatee is written in C++ and has API available for a number of other programming languages including Python, Java, Perl and Ruby. Recently, it was rewritten into Go for faster processing of corpus queries.
Bonito
Bonito is a web interface for Manatee providing access to corpus search. It based on the principle of the client–server model when Bonito is the client part. It is written in Python.
Corpus Architect
Corpus Architect is a web interface providing corpus building and management features. As programming language was used Python.
Applications
Sketch Engine has been used by major British or other publishing houses for producing dictionaries such as Macmillan English Dictionary, Dictionnaires Le Robert, Oxford University Press or Shogakukan and four of the UK’s five biggest dictionary publishers use Sketch Engine.