Abstract
This study addresses the pressing question how to make corpora accessible to users who are not able or willing to learn a programing language, or who are not granted full access to the data. The design of query methods and user interface is not a mere technical problem, as it shapes the whole paradigm of corpus linguistics, while being shaped by the same paradigm in return.
The more specific a tool is the more tightly it is bound to the given paradigm, the less inventiveness it allows or at least encourages. The unambiguity and strict formal definition is a requirement to be a fluent tool for communication with a query processing engines.
Nevertheless, for many researchers, the strictness of formal languages such as CQL poses a major obstacle. Not to mention its notation, which discriminates against dyslexic users; the whole idea of formal language, which generates meaning bottom-up by combining specific building blocks according to strict rules, is very foreign not only to untrained hobbyists but even to many professionals.
In an attempt to address this issue, we have developed an automatic translator from a nearnatural language to CQL.