I thought I'd give a little sneak peak at the current interface for the new version of aConCorde under development. You'll notice that it still needs a bit of polish visually (e.g, the status bars, but bulk of the functionality is there. With any luck, it'll only be a couple more weeks before I release v0.8.

Click this link for a screenshot: aconcorde_0.8_ss1.png

There have been a few queries recently about the progress of aConCorde since the last releast of aConCorde. Let me assure you that work does continue on the concordancer, albeit at a rather slow pace. This is because aConCorde does not tie in with my research interests, and so is essentially a hobby!

That said, I have submitted a paper to Corpus Linguistics 2005 conference which I am confident that it will be accepted. This paper discusses a NEW version of aConCorde that is significantly improved on the old version. The only problem is... it's not been written yet! The entire program is being re-written from scratch. I've spent a while implementing a really fast and robust core concordance engine — this deals with the loading of (many) large corpora, and permits very quick searches for finding concordances of target words (or phrases).

Another exciting element is Arabic root/stem-based searches. A prototype of this does exist already that was added to the v0.5 code. It takes advantage of the data from Buckwalter's morphological analyser to permit these special types of searches. I believe this is a significant step towards improving Arabic concordance — I hope others will like it too, especially when used within a classroom context for teaching Arabic as a foreign language.

The conference takes place this July. So, providing my paper gets accepted, the new release (v0.8) will be available in time for my presentation. I hope you can be patient!

Obviously, this is only a minor release. But it looks like v0.5 will take longer than expected, so I have decided to release this version in the meantime.

• Loading of corpora is significantly quicker.
• Performance of concordance output is also faster.
• A new configuration file (aConCorde.properties) allows you to set the default context size permanently.
• Fixes UNIX build.sh bug.

Please view the README for complete information about all the features and information about how to install and run. Go to the download section to get your copy!

You all may be interested to know what you can look forward to in the next version of aConCorde. The primary focus of v0.5 is to extend the capabilities of the software by adding parallel concordance functionality.

With only a week passing since the release of v0.4, surprising progress has been made. Basic functionality for displaying concordance of parallel aligned texts has been implemented. However, much more work has to be done to ensure it is robust and also general enough to cope with the great variety of alignment annotation schemes.

Thanks all for your patience, but a last, a significantly improved version of aConCorde has just been released. As already stated in the previous news update, verion 0.4 contains the following new features:

• Support for multiple corpora being opened at the same time.
• Punctuation is now included in concordance output and no longer disregarded.
• Ability to now save concordance output to file (as either plain text or HTML aligned tables in a number of encodings).
• Extra text encoding standards: CodePage Windows-1256, IBM Arabic (Cp420), ISO Latin/Arabic (ISO8859_6) and MacArabic.
• A number of little bug fixes.

Please view the README for complete information about all the features and information about how to install and run. Go to the download section to get your copy!

For those who tried v0.3 will see that it is really only a prototype of things to come. The latest version (0.4) has been under development for a while now and will hopefully be out in the near future. New features that are currently included are:

• Support for multiple corpora being opened at the same time.
• Punctuation is now included in concordance output and no longer disregarded.
• Ability to now save concordance output to file.
• A number of little bug fixes.

I hope to get this released in the near future, so watch this space for the announcement!

Version 0.3 is available for download. This is the first public release. Features include:

• Full Arabic support (no need to transliterate to ASCII before concordance).
• English and Arabic native interface
• Multiplatform - requires Java Runtime environment. (See support for help).
• Supports Unicode (UTF-16), UTF8 and ASCII encoding.
• Frequency analysis
• Concordance can be sorted on left or right contexts
• It's free!