• Myself, so far. I've searched the whole web for the appropriate set of tools while working on my Ph. D. Even though some tools were close to what I was looking for, I never found THE killer application that would suit my corpus-processing needs. This is why I decided to develop it myself. But if you would like to participate, your help would be most appreciated.

• CoPT, Corpus Processing Tools, is a set of java classes intended to assist field linguists, NLP (Natural Language Processing) researchers and developers, students and software developers in all corpus-related processing.

• CoPT is also intended as an open and collaborative corpus-processing platform, allowing individuals to contribute their effort.

• CoPT will be released as a standalone application for final users, and as a set of beans or plug-ins for developers (to be integrated in existing NLP-related platforms: GATE, OpenNLP, Unitex, PRAAT, Anvil). CoPT will, therefore, aim at providing a corpus processing-related API, together with a set of methods and procedures for that task.

• At this stage, I intend to develop the following tools:
• N-Grams related classes for creating statistical models of natural languages, and for studying collocations and word associations. The intended goal is to provide a set of basic pluggable statistical tests useful for spotting collocational behavior and word association, which can be extended as needed.
• Tools for converting existing transcription or text files into open source database formats.
• Basic formatting classes for sending and retrieving data from other corpus-related applications, namely Unitex and PRAAT, which are ones I'm currently using most of the time. Interaction with Anvil is also planned. Eventually, if the need arises, interactions with GATE, will be taken in consideration.
  

• For linguists dealing with actual spoken, written, or signed languages, a corpus is a sample of linguistic behavior which they intend to study. So, for those linguists, a corpus represents the set of experimental data they will use in their investigation. 
• For CoPT, a corpus is a set of linearly-ordered symbols (left to right OR right to left, for now). This means that CoPT only works on transcription files or texts taken from natural languages. CoPT DOES NOT work on the original signal: audio or video, for example.
  

• Students working on corpora, whatever their theoretical and methodological school of thought should be able to use CoPT with some profit, I hope. Students working on Natural Language Processing assignements should also consider CoPT as a good framework for learning about project development.
• Researchers: field linguists and corpus linguists should find useful tools for mining their corpora and for turning them into valuable data collections.
• Developers should also find here a concentration of otherwise scattered corpus-related features, which will be available through a standard API: tagging (requires some third-party software), concordancing, statistical tools (eg. Khi-2 test).
  

As of this date, no precise schedule is available for the different releases of CoPT. 

A set of test applets is available, though, for different modules, such as:

<>
• WordLCS (in French for now, English version coming soon)
• soon to come other applets.
  

Available releases

• WordLCS_V1, 21/03/2005, just type the following command: java WordLCS_V1 "String one here" "String two here", and you will get:
• Contiguous Longest Common Substring (i.e. "String -")
• Discontiguous Longest Common Subsequence (i.e. "String - here").
  

History

• 23 sept. 2003: submission of the project description to Sourceforge.net's assessment staff
• 24 sept. 2003: acceptance notification by Sourceforge.net's assessment staff
• 25 sept. 2003: first public description of the project
• 29 sept. 2003: first release of public description on http://copt.sourceforge.net
• 21 mar. 2005 (at last !): first release of WordLCS_V1 class and applet

Documentation

You will find here the documentation to the following classes:

• WordLCS_V1 (javadoc)
  

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Author: Antonio BALVET
Last updated: 21 mar. 2005