The Sisyphus Concordancer

Whether you are a professional lexicographer or a learner of a foreign language, you will need the insight into the target language with which only a computer program can provide you in the form of a concordance.

Although quite a few concordancing programs are available for the PC, the Sisyphus Concordancer for Windows might be your choice, since it offers powerful tools and advanced features for the Sisyphean work of wordlist and concordance compilation.

This program is designed for interactive work, so fast response time has been treated as a major factor. Still, you can handle multiple input files up to 4 GB in size, or process only given parts of them. Produce a full or selective wordlist in a few seconds, and sort it in alphabetical, reverse alphabetical or frequency order. A sophisticated alphabet handler lets you examine a huge number of languages, including English and Hungarian by default. Once you have got the wordlist, look for any given string of characters: the powerful regular expression (REGEX) search engine of the program helps you find exactly what you want, no less, no more. Unlike wildcard search methods, regular expression searches can help you in the lemmatization process; the Sisyphus Concordancer aims to implement semi-automatic lemmatization.

Having created a wordlist, the user can select words or groups of words, and produce a KWIC concordance, which shows all occurrences of your keywords in context and each occurrence in scrollable full context, if needed. You can even create multiple concordance windows, sort them by left or rigt context, categorize each line (useful for meaning separation), then copy selected concordance lines to the standard Windows clipboard and post-edit them in a word processor, or import them into your favourite database manager.

See the Sisyphus Concordancer in action, and download it at www.klte.hu/~tagoston/sco.html