Definition and design of an interface for treebanks exploitation by non-computer scientists: the ScienQuest platform from Scientext project Définition et conception d’une interface pour l’exploitation de corpus arborés pour non-informaticiens : la plateforme ScienQuest du projet Scientext

The NLP community has developed many corpora with rich annotations but these resources are not easily accessible to researchers with little computer expertise. If the NLP community is eager to make available annotated corpora to a wider audience of non-specialists, it is imperative to design and develop user-friendly interfaces, which is not a trivial problem. In this article, in the framework of the Scientext project, we examine several criteria and methods in order to develop such an interface and we highlight the drawbacks of existing systems. We then present the ScienQuest system, dedicated to several kinds of linguistic queries : textual parts, part of speech, syntactic functions. As expected, a first evaluation shows that simple and assisted query modes are preferred to complex query languages. Beyond the Scientext Project, the ScienQuest environment, developed as a generic tool, is planned to be used with various free textual resources.