BCQL

BlackLab Corpus Query Language or BCQL is a powerful query language for text corpora.

It is a dialect of the CQP Query Language introduced by the IMS Corpus WorkBench (CWB). Several other corpus engines support a similar language, such as the Lexicom Sketch Engine. The various dialects are very similar, but differ in some of the more advanced features.

This section documents the various ways to use BCQL to query your data:

• Token-based querying: the most common way to query corpora, where you search for specific words or patterns in the text.
• Relations querying: query (dependency) relations between words or spans of text.
• Parallel querying: querying your parallel corpora, finding alignments between different languages or historical versions of a text.
• Miscellaneous: other information about BCQL, such as operator precedence, features and comparisons with other corpus engines.