Adding a Stop List in AntConc 4.0 (Big Sur)

[kristop...@gmail.com]

Hello all,

Thanks to Laurence for all of his work on AntConc (and other tools!). They are a great help!

I have a student who is using the newest version of AntConc and we haven't been able to figure out how to add a stop list. The user manual for version 4.0 isn't up yet.

Thanks in advance to this group for your help!

Best,

Kris Kyle

[Laurence Anthony]

HI Kris,

Nice to hear from you. Are you attending CL2021?

Thanks for trying out the new version. Actually, I haven't officially announced the new version yet, so it's a bit experimental at this point. I quietly uploaded it on my site last week in the form of a 'release candidate' so that I could introduce it to the Birmingham University Corpus Linguistics Summer Seminar. Since then, I've been getting some feedback from various people, and hope to upload another release candidate in the next day or so that addresses various issues (e.g. the pagination jumping back to show 10 hits).

As for your question, first, the help page for the new version is embedded in the actual program. So, you can see a basic explanation via the Help menu.

At the moment, there isn't really a way to apply a stop list. The only options are the following:

a) Load in a word list containing the target words of interest

b) Generate a complete word list and then filter (search) the results for target words of interest.

Perhaps I can ask you question. How would you like a stop list to work? Here are a few options:

1) Work as in AntConc 3.5.9. A stop list can only be applied to an already generated word list, and it only impacts on the word list and keyword list results.

2) Have a stop list applied more globally, so that applying the stop list effectively removes the words from the corpus. Of course, for KWIC, this would be odd, because the the concordance lines would appear to have gaps in them.

3) Have a stop list work very, very locally to only the current analysis, but potentially across all tools (except KWIC). In effect, it simply hides results that contain words in the stop list.

My own feeling is that a stop list is a rather blunt instrument, when applied globally. But, I can see the value in having the software filter results, hiding those where the stop words appears (e.g. hiding all clusters and n-grams that include 'the'). In this sense, I would opt from 3). What do you think?

Laurence.

###############################################################
Laurence ANTHONY, Ph.D.
Professor of Applied Linguistics
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University
3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan
E-mail: antho...@gmail.com
WWW: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
###############################################################

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[Kristopher Kyle]

Hi Laurence!

Thanks so much for your super quick response! My student just tried version 3.5.9 and it is working well (Note that I like a lot of the features that you added in 4.0 - well done as always!).

Alas, no, I won't be at CL2021 - I opted for AILA this summer (will you be there?).

I agree with your assessment of stop lists. I do think that it would be nice to be able to filter n-gram lists as well as other lists - and I think that working at the level of a single analysis is completely adequate. 

Thanks again for your dedication to the continued development of these tools!

Hope to see you in person soon,

Kris

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/antconc/CAL6Fgv2wGvChbojsaRDZrkFtcC%2B0fga49fXEX6oOvSHBu-VxaA%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Kristopher Kyle

Assistant Professor

Department of Linguistics

University of Oregon

www.kristopherkyle.com

[Laurence Anthony]

Hi Kris,

Thanks for the feedback. It's good to hear that you student is fine.

I'm currently trying out all tools/functions of the new version with the BNC (1994) to make sure things are working smoothly. If AntConc can work comfortably with 100  million word corpora, I think that will cover the majority of use cases. It probably also means that the program is scaling well and will work with even bigger corpora.

Laurence.

###############################################################
Laurence ANTHONY, Ph.D.
Professor of Applied Linguistics
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University
3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan
E-mail: antho...@gmail.com
WWW: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/
###############################################################

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/antconc/CAJUaXFhCt2Lhu7xsuahRVpB23o_7XcNxcuPQOGm9wX11xt0PUg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Laurence Anthony]

Just a follow up on this thread for people coming back to it later. The latest version of AntConc 4 now has the ability to add a stop list. You will find the function in the Global Settings under "Tool filters", where you can use or hide words from a list across a variety of tools.

Laurence.