What is CLARIN-CH Content Search?#
CLARIN-CH Content Search is an online service provided by CLARIN-CH that allows users to search language data stored across multiple institutions in a standardized way. These language resources include various types of corpora (i.e., large text collections), such as journalistic texts, transcripts of the European Parliament, movie subtitles, and other collections.
After submitting your search term, CLARIN-CH Content Search will display a list of relevant corpus examples, along with information about the corpus and the institution providing it, as well as links to the resources.
Currently, CLARIN-CH Content Search provides access to selected public corpora from:
Swiss-AL, a language data platform for applied sciences developed by the ZHAW Digital Discourse Lab, and
the LCP Corpus Platform, developed by LiRI – Linguistic Research Infrastructure.
CLARIN-CH Content Search is a Swiss implementation of the CLARIN Federated Content Search (FCS), a system that enables users to search a wide range of language resources in a standardized way.
See also: How can I search in other corpora
How to use the CLARIN-CH Content Search?#
To perform a simple word search, go to the Text Layer CQL Query field at the top of the page, enter your query (for example, “Hashtag”), and press the search button or the Enter key.
Once the search starts, results will load as responses arrive from each resource. You can adjust the number of results per resource (up to 50 hits per endpoint). You can also:
Filter results by language
Filter results by resource
When the search is complete (for example, “2/2 complete” for two responding endpoints), you will see a list of resources with results.
You can choose to display results in the KWIC (Key Word in Context) format, which is commonly used in corpus linguistics to help users quickly scan how a word is used in context.
If you are particularly interested in one resource, you can click View to focus on its results. There you will also find additional details about that corpus and the languages it contains.
Can I search in other corpora and languages as well?#
You can use the FCS Aggregator provided by CLARIN.eu to search across more than 500 language resources in over 160 languages. When you use the aggregator, your query is sent to multiple endpoints (not only the Swiss ones). Each one searches its own data and returns results, which are then combined into a unified result list.
FCS provides a standardized interface for querying and displaying data across institutions. In contrast, national endpoints like CLARIN-CH may offer additional or customized features.
For more information, see the CLARIN Content Search Tutorial.