Searching for linguistic phenomena in literary digital libraries

Abstract

This paper describes a set of tools and Java classes that allow the Lucene text search engine to use morphological information to index and search; in particular, it describes the use of the linguistic resources developed for the Apertium open-source machine translation platform to extract morphological information while indexing. We describe which linguistic information is automatically obtained, how to use it when indexing new documents with Lucene, and how linguistic attributes can be used to specify query terms. The use of morphological information makes it possible to search for specific linguistic phenomena, and to explore in a richer way the cultural heritage in current digital libraries.