This will generate a table of collocates that occur either side of the matches to the query.
You can access this by selecting the 'Span Based' option in the 'External Collocates' group in the 'Select a task..' drop down menu on the results screen. Some options to help you refine the collocate results will be displayed below the 'Select a task...' menu.
The options are:
Selecting an option from this drop down menu will specify which sides to extract collocates from. The options are:
| Both | Extract collocates from the left and right side of each match. This is the default. |
| Left | Extract collocates from only the left side of each match. |
| Right | Extract collocates from only the right side of each match. |
From the two drop down menus you can select the positions of the words from each match you want to extract collocates from. The first box sets the start position and the second the end position. The default is positions 1 to 4.
Checking this option will group together results that differ only by case. This is unchecked by default (case sensitive).
This specifies how to treat part-of-speech tags when building the table. The options are:
| Ignore | POS tags won't be considered and the results will grouped by only the words. This is the default. |
| Attach | POS tags will be attached to each word and results will be broken down according to both. |
| Only | Words will be ignored and the results will be grouped only by POS tags. |
Checking this option will exclude stopwords from the table. Unchecking it will include them. This is checked by default (exclude).
Entering a value into this box will specify the minimum number of times each collocate must occur to be included in the table. The default is 5.
Selecting an option from this drop down menu will add a score column to the table of collocates. The score can one of:
Entering a value in this box will specify the maximum number of results to display in the table. Entering 0 or leaving the box blank will remove any limit. The default is 1000.
The collocate table is made up of the following columns:
| Word | The collocate. This may be a word, a POS tag or both depending on the POS option chosen. |
| LTotal | The number of times the collocate occurs to the left in the specified span. |
| L1,L2... | The number of times the collocate occurs to the left in the position specified by the number in the column header. |
| Total | The number of times the collocate occurs on either side in the specified span. |
| R1,R2... | The number of times the collocate occurs to the right in the position specified by the number in the column header. |
| RTotal | The number of times the collocate occurs to the right in the specified span. |
| Score | The score generated by the method indicated in the header. |
Note that not all of these columns may be included depending on the options selected.
If included the table will be sorted on the Score column, if not it will be sorted on the Total column. You can resort the table by clicking on the column header you wish to sort on.
Clicking on a number in the Lx or Rx columns will display the concordances where the collocate occurs in that position. Note that after this the 'Select a task...' options will still process every result of the query.