Annotations may be searched for using an annotation name and value. The names of the annotations vary from corpus to corpus, though many corpora contain part-of-speech and lemma annotations with the names pos and lemma respectively (annotation names are case sensitive). For example, to search for all forms of the German verb sein 'to be' in a corpus with lemma annotation such as PCC2, simply select the PCC2 corpus and enter:
lemma="sein"Negative searches are also possible using != instead of =. For negated tokens (word forms) use the reserved attribute tok. For example:
lemma!="sein"or:
tok!="ist"Metadata can also be negated similarly:
lemma="sein" & meta::Genre!="Sport"To only find finite forms of this verb in PCC2, use the part-of-speech (pos) annotation concurrently, and specify that both the lemma and pos should apply to the same element:
lemma="sein" & pos="VAFIN" & #1 _=_ #2The expression #1 _=_ #2 uses the span identity operator to specify that the first annotation and the second annotation apply to exactly the same position in the corpus. Annotations can also apply to longer spans than a single token: for example, in PCC2, the annotation Inf-Stat signifies the information structure status of a discourse referent. This annotation can also apply to phrases longer than one token. The following query finds spans containing new discourse referents, not previously mentioned in the text:
exmaralda:Inf-Stat="new"If the corpus contains no more than one annotation type named Inf-Stat, the optional namespace (in this case exmaralda:) may be dropped; if there are multiple annotations with the same name but different namespaces, dropping the namespace will find all of those annotations. In order to view the span of tokens to which this annotation applies, enter the and click on "Show Result", then open the exmaralda annotation level to view the grid containing the span. Further operators can test the relationships between potentially overlapping annotations in spans. For example, the operator _i_ examines whether one annotation fully contains the span of another annotation (the i stands for 'includes'):
Topic="ab" & Inf-Stat="new" & #1 _i_ #2This query finds aboutness topics (Topic="ab") containing information structurally new discourse referents.