CorpusTools 1.1.0 Release Notes

This is a major version release for Phonological CorpusTools.

Importing corpora

  • Importing corpora functionality in the GUI received a large overhaul

  • All types of corpora are imported through a single dialog

  • PCT should autodetect many settings based on selected files or directories

  • Autodetected settings can be edited and refined by the user

  • Basic logging support saves parsing details entered by the user (i.e., multicharacter segments)

  • Numbers in transcriptions can be parsed as stress, tone, or as a normal character (note that tone and stress are currently not supported in functions or phonological search)

Pronunciation variants

  • All algorithms that analyze segments support four strategies for dealing with pronunciation variants: canonical forms, most frequent variants, separated tokens as types, and tokens weighted by their relative frequenies

  • Algorithms that analyze words support two strategies for pronunciation variants: canonical forms and most frequent variants

  • Exporting corpora can now export pronunciation variants (and their frequencies)

Functional load

  • Added support for finding the average functional load of single segments

Phonotactic probability

  • Fixed an issue where calculating biphone probabilities on single segment words would cause errors; now assigns a probability of 0 to those words

Kullback-Leibler divergence

  • Added options to bring KL divergence in line with the other functions

  • Added command line script for calculating KL divergence

GUI

  • Added a dialog to the “View/change feature system” dialog to edit the categorization of segments into a coherent segment chart via features

  • Features can be used as input to the analysis functions, i.e. functional load of voice in the corpus (segements that are +voice compared to segments that are -voice)

Segment selection

  • Segment selection has been redone

  • Segments can be selected via the inventory

  • Features can be typed into the filter field, which will highlight segments that will be included with that feature selection

  • Once a feature specification has been entered, that segment set can be locked in

Environments

  • Environment creation has been revamped

  • Users can select a set of center segments

  • Right hand and left hand can be added, with multiple sets of segments on each side

Known issues

  • Help pages for the Mac binary require internet connection to view, due to issues including .html files in the .app binary