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3ET: Choosing Features

In the “Sentences” and “Sentence Units” tabs you can specify search criteria based on the value of various features of the sentence units in the database.

The text database contains various sentence units (clauses, words etc.); each of these has various features (case, tense, lexeme etc.) with various values (dative, present, “εἰμί” etc.).

In the “Sentences” and “Sentence Units” tabs you first select the kind of sentence unit you are interested in (some databases only know the sentence unit word), then you choose one or more features and for each feature you indicate one or more values.

When it searches through the database, 3ET looks for sentence units that meet all the specified criteria. If, for instance, you specified that tense should be present and lexeme should be εἰμί, then both of these criteria must be met for 3ET to choose a sentence unit.

For each relevant feature, you can specify a number of values and indicate if 3ET should search for feature=value or feature≠value. If you specify more than one value, the program will interpret it thus:

There are four types of features:

Lists
Lists are features that have a limited number of values. For example, the person feature, which can take the values 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or N/A (that is, Not Applicable, which is used with words where the person concept makes no sense, such as adjectives.) List features are specified by ticking the relevant values:
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Foreign texts
Foreign texts are features whose value consists of letters in a foreign alphabet, such as the lexeme feature. (The lexeme is the word form given in a dictionary. For instance, the English word “slept” has the lexeme “sleep”.) If, for example, you wish to train forms of the verb “εἰμί”, you can specify that the lexeme feature must have the value “εἰμί”. Foreign text features can be given in two different ways:
If you have set your program preferences to indicate that you have a foreign keyboard, the feature value is simply typed in the input field:
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If your program preferences indicate that you have no foreign keyboard, the feature value is typed in Latin characters: (Read more about typing Greek and Hebrew.)
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You can type up to four values. If you select =, 3ET will search for words where the feature has one of the specified values. If you select ≠, 3ET will search for words where the feature has none of the specified values. There an additional third option: You can select ~, which means that 3ET will search for a so-called regular expression. Regular expression can be rather complicated, but a simple use is this: If the feature value is given as, say, “εἰ” and you select ~, 3ET will search for words containing the characters “εἰ”.
Latin texts
Latin texts are features whose value is a set of letters in the Latin alphabet. This type of feature is quite rare when working with Greek and Hebrew. An advanced example is found in the Hebrew WIVU database, where the sentence unit clause has the feature text type, which is a Latin text. The feature values are given by simply typing the characters:
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You can type up to four values. You can choose to search by =, ≠, or ~ as explained above.
Numbers
Numbers are features with a numeric value. This type of feature is quite rare. An advanced example is found in the Hebrew WIVU database, where the sentence unit clause has the feature levels of embedding, which is a number. The feature values are given by simply typing the value:
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You can type up to four values. You can choose to search by = or ≠.

Go to main page Updated: 2009-07-07 13:18:45