We present the steps taken towards an exploration platform for a multi-modal corpus of German lyric poetry from the Romantic era developed in the project »textklang«. This interdisciplinary project develops a mixed-methods approach for the systematic investigation of the relationship between written text (here lyric poetry) and its potential and actual sonic realisation (in recitations, musical performances etc.). The multi-modal »textklang« platform will be designed to technically and analytically combine three modalities: the poetic text, the audio signal of a recorded recitation and, at a later stage, music scores of a musical setting of a poem. The methodological workflow will enable scholars to develop hypotheses about the relationship between textual form and sonic/prosodic realisation based on theoretical considerations, text interpretation and evidence from recorded recitations. The full workflow will support hypothesis testing either through systematic corpus analysis alone or with addtional contrastive perception experiments. For the experimental track, researchers will be enabled to manipulate prosodic parameters in (re-)synthesised variants of the original recordings. The focus of this paper is on the design of the base corpus and on tools for systematic exploration – placing special emphasis on our response to challenges stemming from multi-modality and the methodologically diverse interdisciplinary setup.

Development of dozens of specialized corpus query systems and languages over the past decades has let to a diverse but also fragmented landscape. Today we are faced with a plethora of query tools that each provide unique features, but which are also not interoperable and often rely on very specific database back-ends or formats for storage. This severely hampers usability both for end users that want to query different corpora and also for corpus designers that wish to provide users with an interface for querying and exploration. We propose a hybrid corpus query architecture as a first step to overcoming this issue. It takes the form of a middleware system between user front-ends and optional database or text indexing solutions as back-ends. At its core is a custom query evaluation engine for index-less processing of corpus queries. With a flexible JSON-LD query protocol the approach allows communication with back-end systems to partially solve queries and offset some of the performance penalties imposed by the custom evaluation engine. This paper outlines the details of our first draft of aforementioned architecture.

Corpus query systems exist to address the multifarious information needs of any person interested in the content of annotated corpora. In this role they play an important part in making those resources usable for a wider audience. Over the past decades, several such query systems and languages have emerged, varying greatly in their expressiveness and technical details. This paper offers a broad overview of the history of corpora and corpus query tools. It focusses strongly on the query side and hints at exciting directions for future development.

Today, we see an ever growing number of tools supporting text annotation. Each of these tools is optimized for specific use-cases such as named entity recognition. However, we see large growing knowledge bases such as Wikipedia or the Google Knowledge Graph. In this paper, we introduce NLATool, a web application developed using a human-centered design process. The application combines supporting text annotation and enriching the text with additional information from a number of sources directly within the application. The tool assists users to efficiently recognize named entities, annotate text, and automatically provide users additional information while solving deep text understanding tasks.