Replacement for WordCruncher

Mark Davies (mdavies@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu)
Fri, 11 Oct 1996 10:22:20 -0500

I've been using WordCruncher as a text indexing / retrieval program for
seven to eight years now, but am interested in moving on. I was promised
two years ago that they were "right on the verge" of releasing a Windows
version that would have the same functionality as my DOS version. Yet last
week I was informed that although the program is "just about done", it will
be lacking at least one feature of the DOS version that I find indispensible.

So I'm looking for an indexing / retrieval program that can do the
following, and hopefully costs $300-400 or less. The one feature I like
most about (the old) WordCruncher is that it allows you to save previous
searches of a long list of words, and be able to call them up to perform
subsequent searches. For example, I can save a file that has all
infinitives in a corpus of Spanish (thousands of verbs, hundreds of
thousands of tokens), or a file in which I have all cases of a certain set
of pronouns before these infinitives. Then at a later time, I can retrieve
this list of infinitives or pronouns+infinitives to join with another set of
words, for example a certain set of prepositions. Anyway, the point is, I
don't want to have to "recreate" the list of infinitives, etc. each time I
do a search. This is something that the old WordCruncher does very well,
but the new one can't do.

In addition to this one feature, I need a program that is _fast_. In
WordCruncher, I can mix one retrieved list (eg. 200,000 pronouns) with
another retrieved list (eg. 250,000 infinitives), and find all cases of the
pronoun right before the infinitive, and it will do it in 1-2 seconds (based
on a 5-7 million word corpus). I guess I've become used to this speed.

Is anyone aware of another program that has the save / retrieval feature
described above, and that is also quite fast? Thanks in advance for your help.

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Mark Davies, Assistant Professor, Spanish Linguistics
Dept. of Foreign Languages, Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4300

Voice:309/438-7975 email:mdavies@ilstu.edu
Fax:309/438-8038 http://www.ilstu.edu/~mdavies/
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