The Parse and Query (PaQu) Application

In this chapter we describe the web application PaQu (Parse and Query), and carry out a small case study to illustrate its use. PaQu is an application for searching in Dutch treebanks and for analysing the search results. One can search in the LASSY and CGN treebanks, or upload one’s own Dutch corpus, which is then parsed and made available for search and analysis. PaQu offers, next to an interface to formulate Xpath queries, a dedicated interface for searching for dependency triples. This makes it easy to search in treebanks for grammatical dependencies, which would otherwise require very complex queries. It offers extensive functionality for analysing the search results. The dedicated search interface makes PaQu a prime example of the kind of applications that CLARIN promotes. The case study provides an analysis of the syntactic selectional differences between two near-synonymous verbs.